


feet on the ground, reaching for the stars

by ProfessorSpork



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Best Friends, Bisexual Steve Harrington, Bonding, Dubious Consent Due To Identity Issues, Friendship, Gay Will Byers, Gen, Grief/Mourning, HIV/AIDS, HIV/AIDS Crisis, Homophobic Language, Lesbian Robin Buckley, Music, Original Character Death(s), Original Character(s), Period-Typical Homophobia, Personal Growth, Pre-Jonathan Byers/Steve Harrington/Nancy Wheeler, Queer Culture, Queer History, Queer Themes, Queerplatonic Relationships, Recreational Drug Use, References to Depression, Self-Acceptance, Self-Doubt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-09 06:21:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 29,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27309835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProfessorSpork/pseuds/ProfessorSpork
Summary: “So,” Mom says one weekend afternoon as she and Robin stare down the Sunday Times crossword, huddled together on the porch swing, “you and Steve Harrington sure have been living in each other’s pockets lately.” She puts down the pen and gives Robin a carefully-probing smile disguised as a teasing one. “Anything you wanna tell me?”Yeah; I’m gay,Robin thinks. Her throat constricts painfully. “I—you’d know if I were dating someone,” she says instead.-[Or: Robin, through the ages.]
Relationships: Jonathan Byers/Nancy Wheeler, Robin Buckley & Steve Harrington
Comments: 58
Kudos: 298
Collections: Good Readings (ymmv)





	feet on the ground, reaching for the stars

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Halloween!
> 
> I started this fic literally weeks after season three aired, which means I’ve been fighting it tooth and nail for over a year now. But Halloween seemed the perfect publication date for a Stranger Things fic—even one as stubbornly not-spooky as this one is—and so here we are!
> 
> I had a few different, sometimes-competing goals going into writing this. First, I wanted to write a fic celebrating everything I love about Robin—chief among them, that she’s a lesbian character who experiences happiness, fulfillment and validation in a way that has nothing to do with shipping. Second, I felt passionately that any story that addresses queerness in the 1980s is incomplete if it doesn’t meaningfully tackle AIDS. And third, I wanted to be meticulously specific about using the precise time period as a vehicle for storytelling. On that last part, I may have gone a bit overboard… aside from the things I blatantly made up, everything is date-accurate—down to the crossword puzzle clues, what’s on TV when, and what was charting on the Hot 100. 
> 
> One note about canon compliance: I messed with the season 3 epilogue timing a tad, because the idea of a) Steve and Robin waiting until October to get new jobs and b) Joyce moving the kids after the school year has started made no sense to me. So those milestones have been moved further up.
> 
> Unbeta’d, because I barely met my artificial deadline in time.

**_(November, 1985)_ **

They’re in Steve’s basement when he says it. Supine on the floor, ear to ear, their feet sprawled out in separate directions.

The air is thick with smoke; Steve had said brownies were too much work and Robin hadn’t cared enough to protest, seeing as it was his weed in the first place. It’s quiet, too. They’ve needed to turn over the record ( _Goodbye Yellow Brick Road—_ Steve knows Robin likes it when he plays Elton John) for a good five minutes now, but they’re too comfortable to get up. The sound of the needle gently bumping up against the edge of the vinyl is weirdly soothing.

And that’s when he breaks the silence:

“We could still date, you know.”

The quiet sense of peace Robin had been cultivating evaporates in an instant. She feels cold all over. “I—what?”

“Like. If that would make it easier on you, if you could tell people you’ve got a boyfriend. He could be me. _I_ could be—it. Him. I’ve graduated, so we wouldn’t even have to, like, kiss in the halls or anything to sell it.”

Sensation returns to her limbs. She exhales in relief—and then the breath turns into cautious laughter. “I can’t believe Steve Harrington thinks I need a beard.” She pauses, trying to get a hold of herself, but against her will giggles erupt out of her. First a trickle, then a flood. She can’t stop; her brain keeps saying _Steve Beardington,_ which is about the most hilarious thing she’s ever thought.

He sits up and frowns at her, looking a little offended at how funny she finds the idea. “I don’t think you need _a beard_ , that doesn’t even—dude, you’re so high. I’m just saying I can date you so people aren’t suspicious.”

“That’s what a beard _is,_ dingus.”

“Oh. …Huh,” he murmurs. Robin finally gets a hold of herself and sits up as well, watching as he processes whatever it is he’s thinking. “Well. The offer stands, anyway.”

“Steve, no. That’s—it’s incredibly sweet, it really is, but I don’t want that for you.”

“It wouldn’t be a problem.”

“Maybe not now, but… someday, you know? I don’t want you to feel like you’re stuck with me. Not when you could have anyone you wanted.”

“Not anyone,” he corrects, his voice sounding oddly distant.

She rolls her eyes. “Okay, fine, maybe not _Nancy Wheeler_ , but you’ll get over her. And then, anyone.”

“Robin—”

“Girls still fall all over you all the time, it’s like you don’t even notice anymore—”

_“Robin.”_

It’s like hearing her own voice out of his mouth. The hollow, fragile certainty of it. _Steve._

“Not anyone,” he repeats, holding her gaze. Gently. Devastated.

_Oh._

“…Oh,” she echoes.

They’ve been on a collision course towards this conversation for months now. Maybe even her whole life.

She’s still not sure she’s ready.

* * *

**_(July, 1969)_ **

On Robin Buckley’s first birthday, a man walks on the moon.

 _(And she’s been a little out there ever since,_ her dad will later joke. Like, all the time.)

It’s not something she remembers, obviously, but she sees the photo album and hears the story enough times that if she closes her eyes, she can just about picture it: the streamers affixed to the walls with Scotch tape; the ice cream cake they’d intended to gently mush between her toothless gums melting, forgotten, as the adults stood transfixed in front of the television. A small step, a giant leap. The world suddenly alive with seemingly endless possibilities. For a few golden hours there, the known universe had been that much bigger.

And then it had shrunk again. Back to normal.

Well. At least in Indiana it had.

Years later, she finally hears the justification for the Apollo missions. They watch a film reel in class—President Kennedy’s thick Boston accent declaring “we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

 _Oh,_ she thinks. _That explains it._

She kind of wishes JFK had given her a different birthday prophecy; something other than purposefully making it hard on her. But then—well, it’s not like things turned out great for him, either. Better gay than dead, she supposes.

Of course, that’s before those become synonyms.

But she’s getting ahead of herself.

* * *

She grows up in a house filled with music.

In many ways, it’s her birthright. Her paternal grandparents met in a crowded, smoky jazz bar in France during World War II. Edward Buckley was a G.I. in the Army band; Miriam Dreyfus was a Jewish lounge singer looking for a way out of Europe.

In fourth grade, Robin’s assigned an oral history project in school, and interviews them about it. The details of it astonish her, though she’d always known the broad strokes. Grand-mère, the story goes, had traded one nightmare for another: she’d converted and married the bar owner, a monsieur Gaspard, in order to escape the Nazis, only to end up trapped in a loveless marriage with a brute who had no qualms about talking with his fists.

(“You remember that, _bijou_ ,” Grand-mère warns, her accent thicker than usual with emotion. “You do not let them change you. They will hunt you down. They will want you dead. But when you hide who you are to escape them— _c’est la vraie mort._ Then _you_ killed you. Do not do their work for them.”)

Seeing Grandpa, she says, was not love at first sight… but listening to him play the clarinet had been love at first hearing. He’d whisked her away and brought her back to the States right out from her husband’s nose—a scandal boasted about with no small amount of pride in the decades that followed.

(“She didn’t even pack a suitcase,” Grandpa says, awe in his voice like he still can’t believe his luck, or her bravery, even after all these years. “Couldn’t risk making him suspicious. But did that stop my Miri? Heck no. She mustered up her gumption and walked out the door with nothing but the clothes on her back and a few francs in her brassiere.” It is this, and not the breathless love affair, that is Robin’s favorite part of the story. Her grandmother, standing up and making a choice. Her gumption and her hidden francs.)

So. They’d moved back to Indiana and had a little boy named Calvin, and in college that boy responded to an ad stapled to the quad bulletin board seeking a piano tutor. Robin’s mom, Patricia, had posted it mostly on a whim: growing up in a house with five brothers, she’d wanted to learn something that would make her stand out; make her feel cultured. They were engaged within a year.

When they’d bought their house in Hawkins, it was the upright piano—not the bed, not the couch, not the crib they’d gotten anticipating Robin’s arrival—that was the first piece of furniture to go through the door.

It is in that house that Grand-mère reads Robin _Histoire de Babar_ and _Le Petit Prince,_ Grandpa in the corner doing scales or playing his way through “Stranger on the Shore” or “Rhapsody in Blue.” Robin’s earliest memories are duets of French and clarinet, her parents gently coaching her on where to put her hands over keys, an endless parade of uncles dropping by.

Mom loves to tell the story of how they realized she had perfect pitch—how, as a toddler, she’d cry uncontrollably when they put on the radio, even though she loved it when they played the exact same songs on the record player at home. It was Grandpa and her mom’s youngest brother, Uncle Ian, who figured it out—dropping the needle on The Partridge Family’s “I Think I Love You” in unison with the radio only to find the station was spinning the record too fast, altering its key and tempo slightly. She’d been able to tell the difference, and only wanted to hear the real thing.

They buy her a clarinet of her own before her fingers are even long enough to reach all of the pegs.

* * *

Because of her late summer birthday, she’s always the youngest in her grade. Which would be fine, except she’s singled out a lot—not even a sibling to keep her company. It’s by design; Mom never wanted Robin to feel lost in a crowd the way she had, growing up.

It maybe works a little too well, because mostly Robin grows up feeling very alone.

She’s not totally without friends—there are nice kids in soccer, and in band—but she never has a _best_ friend. One person her age who feels like just hers. It weighs on her; makes her feel weird, makes her feel different. Her family tries to make up for it, but there’s only so much they can do.

(Robin never got to meet her maternal grandparents, the Kincaids. They died in a car crash before she was born, leaving Grandpa and Grand-mère with not just a daughter-in-law, but all her brothers, too. A whole messy brood of new sort-of sons. This is what Robin knows: you take family where you find it, when you can—because not everyone is lucky enough to get it. Sticking together when you find your people… that’s what it means to be a Buckley.)

Still. After Grandpa and Grand-mère move to Florida, sick of the Indiana winters, Robin flounders. So Uncle Ian makes a point of coming by more often.

Robin _loves_ Uncle Ian.

He never talks down to her; instead, he has conversations with her like she’s a tiny adult. They watch old movies together at The Hawk—first the classics, and then films she doesn’t quite understand but laughs along to anyway, or nods seriously at when Ian does the same. Sometimes they’re in French, and he practices with her so she doesn’t lose the language. He knows she likes puzzles, likes figuring things out, so he asks her the easy ones when he and Mom do the Sunday crossword; brings over thousand-piece jigsaws to do on the weekends.

She comes home from picture day in first grade crying her eyes out because Tommy H. made fun of her freckles, and runs straight past her parents and into Ian’s arms to explain.

“Aw, kids like that just have no imagination,” Ian says. “They’re just jealous they’re not covered in art.”

Robin sniffles. “Huh?”

He grabs a pen from the kitchen junk drawer and, gently, connects the dots of some of the freckles on her arm—a navy ink diamond appearing on her skin. “It spells your name, see?” he says. _“Bijou._ ”

“It’s just a square,” she grumbles, shrugging, but her tears dry all the same.

“A _jewel,_ ” he corrects. “Just like you. And you can play games, too—wanna see?”

Using her arms as their canvas, they play dots and boxes and tic-tac-toe until she’s so covered in blue her mother insists on throwing her in the bath.

* * *

**_(March, 1977)_ **

When she’s eight years old, sometime not long after Mom’s thirtieth birthday, Uncle Ian takes Robin out for a ride to the quarry. He drives her around all afternoon, like she’s cool enough that she’s worth hanging out with on her own. That’s what he always calls it—hanging out. It’s never _babysitting_ when it’s Uncle Ian.

And even though it’s only March and there’s still snow on the ground, they roll down the windows and sing along as Casey Kasem counts down the Top 40. Every lyric feels like a promise: _There’ll be peace when you are done. You can go your own way. With a bit of rock music, everything is fine._

At the quarry they turn off the radio, step out of the car and perch high on the edge of the cliffs—nothing ahead but sheer rock walls and the still water, far below.

Robin cups her hands over her mouth and shouts “Echo!” into the abyss. And her own voice greets her in return, reverberating across the limestone: _echo, echo, echo._ A whole choir of invisible Robins, acting as her backup singers. Ian laughs, and tucks her into his side, and they listen to the wind across the rocks; the crunch of gravel under their thighs.

“People like us, Robin,” he says, after a long moment, “we march to the beat of our own drum.”

She knows the expression, but she’s never particularly identified with it. People who don’t know how to clap on the beat are the _worst._ Still—the fact that Ian thinks there’s a club they belong to, just the two of them, warms her chest. She wants it to be true.

(Later, she’ll wonder how on earth he knew, so long before she ever knew herself.)

But he’s still talking: “And that’s why I’ve gotta get out of here, kid. I can’t stay in Hawkins anymore—it’s killing me. And I didn’t want you to hear it from your mom and dad, I wanted you to hear it from me. I… I, um…”

Cold dread fills Robin’s stomach as he trails off. “You’re leaving?”

“Yeah, Robin. Yeah. Sorry.”

“W-where are you going?”

He takes a deep breath. In. Out. “I’m moving to San Francisco. ”

If Robin’s being honest, she isn’t exactly sure where San Francisco is. She knows it’s in California, which means it’s far away, but she has no picture for it in her head. No frame of reference. She bites her lip.

“Well… can I write to you?” she asks. She’s been practicing her cursive—she’s getting pretty good.

“Of _course_ you can write to me,” he breathes, sounding immensely relieved. “We’ll be pen pals.”

They get back in the car right as the countdown finishes, Casey reminding them to _keep your feet on the ground, and keep reaching for the stars._

(Before he leaves, Ian buys her a model globe—all the countries and states in different colors, capitals and major cities labeled.

“There’s you,” he says, putting his pinky finger on the spot between Indianapolis and Lake Michigan. Then he stretches his hand, his thumb plunking down atop the San Francisco Bay. “And there’s me. See? Not so far.” He lifts his hand up—his fingers still curled up like that, _hang loose._ He puts his fist to his ear, demonstrating: “Just a phone call away.”

“You’re so _corny,”_ she complains, but she laughs anyway.)

* * *

**_(Fall, 1979)_ **

When middle school starts, everyone has to pick a foreign language track. Robin wants to take French—who wouldn’t say yes to an easy A?—but Mom and Dad won’t let her. Faced with a choice of Spanish, Italian, Latin, or German, she picks Italian. It feels romantic, somehow. And besides, they have the best movies.

She still doesn’t have a best friend. Sometimes, it feels like she doesn’t have _any_ friends. When she realizes she’s the only girl on the soccer team not invited to Becky R.’s slumber party, she manages to hold it together all through practice, but the birthday cupcakes Mrs. R.’s brought in taste like cardboard in her mouth. When it’s over she sits on the curb, waiting to be picked up as all the other girls pile into three different sedans to carpool to Becky’s place, and she tries to figure it out. What on earth it is about her that’s so different from them; how they can tell, when she herself has no idea.

One night, she overhears Mom talking about her on the phone. Quietly as she can, she sneaks upstairs and picks up the extension; to her surprise, it’s Ian’s voice on the other end. Pleading, she can tell— trying hard not to get annoyed. He wants Robin to come out and visit him next summer! He thinks she’s old enough, and he wants to show her everything. His apartment in the Castro; the Pacific Ocean. He even says there’s a parade they can go to.

Mom says _absolutely not,_ and Robin gently hangs up the landline before she can hear the reasons why.

Then she starts packing.

* * *

She makes it as far as the bus station before the cops catch up with her.

Or—fine, that makes it sound more dramatic than it is. She’s the only person waiting on the lone bench under the streetlamp when the big Hawkins Police Department truck pulls into an empty parking space and Chief Hopper himself gets out.

(And hey, that’s something. She merits the _Chief,_ not just some officer. Hopper is new to the job, she knows, but not new to town. According to Dad, Hopper grew up here in Hawkins; they went to high school together. It’s not something Robin likes to think about—if Hopper could leave and then come back, why can’t Ian?)

Here’s something else she knows: the old police chief, Anderson, would have called Robin’s parents immediately. He was an old coot who liked to yell at kids for being on the playground after dark or lingering outside Melvald’s with their candy.

Hopper, on the other hand, just sits right down on the bench beside her, smelling of stale beer and Marlboro smoke. He nudges his chin towards her backpack and grunts: “Lemme see that, huh?” She knows it’s an order, but his phrasing is soft. Almost a question. Curious, not punitive.

She hands it to him.

With unexpectedly gentle hands, he unzips the bag and removes its contents: two ham and cheese sandwiches in Ziploc baggies, a scarf long and wide enough it could double as a blanket, and a few old issues of _Wonder Woman._ He lets out one quick, surprised chuckle. “How far were you plannin’ on getting with these?”

“I’ve got thirteen dollars in my pocket,” Robin mutters defensively—choosing not to mention that some of it is in quarters.

He whistles. _“Well._ Thirteen _dollars._ ” She knows he’s making fun of her, but she can’t help but feel like something in his voice _is_ a bit taken aback that she thought it through even this far. Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking.

She stares at her shoes, feeling her ears heat up in embarrassment. “I’m not running away. I’m just going to see my uncle.”

“Coulda told your folks that.”

“I was going to come back.”

He stares her down, utterly unimpressed.

Robin swallows. “I shouldn’t have left without saying goodbye,” she allows.

He barks out a laugh. “Sure, kid, we’ll start there. No, you shouldn’t have left without saying goodbye.” His voice gets weird and gruff when he adds, “Generally, people like some warning before you leave them.”

“Am I under arrest?”

He laughs properly, then—a deep, full belly laugh. “What? No. No, you’re not under arrest. Christ.”

“Am I in trouble?”

“Oh, definitely. Just not with me.”

She nods, eyes still glued to the ground. That seems fair. “Why didn’t they come look for me themselves?”

“I told ‘em not to. They’re at home calling all your friends’ parents to see if you’re crashing with any of them. That’s policy.”

 _What friends?_ she thinks miserably, but that definitely explains that. Robin’s parents could stay on the phone an awful long time, if they’re looking for Robin with other people.

She sniffles, fighting back tears that suddenly want to fall all over again. “Could we stay out here just another minute? Just until the bus leaves.” Even if she’s not on it, she wants to see. To watch it pull away, knowing that it’s heading from Hawkins all the way to San Francisco; that such a journey is possible.

He’s got no reason to say yes to her. He’s probably got plenty of better things to do, even on a sleepy Thursday night. But Hopper gets very solemn, and his eyes go kind of soft, and he nods.

While they wait, she starts re-packing all of the stuff he removed back into her knapsack.

“Who’s that?” he asks, gesturing down at one of the comic book covers.

“That’s Wonder Woman.”

He rolls his eyes. “I’m not so ancient I haven’t heard of _Wonder Woman,_ kid. I meant the fella.”

“Oh. That’s Steve Trevor. He’s—kind of her boyfriend?”

“I thought Superman was Wonder Woman’s boyfriend.” He winces under Robin’s withering stare, holding his hands up in contrition. “So I’m not an expert. Yeesh!”

Robin purses her lips, trying to hide a smile. He’s kind of funny, is all. Hopper. Chief Anderson would never.

“He got a superpower? This _Steve?”_ he asks, putting derisive emphasis on the name. Like it’s the most boring, ordinary name in the world.

“Not really. He’s just… nice. I mean he’s not completely useless—he’s in the army, or whatever—but mostly he makes dumb jokes and gets kidnapped a lot.”

“Oh, like Robin,” Hopper says, then balks when he realizes that’s her name, too. “Batman’s Robin,” he clarifies needlessly.

“I guess,” she mumbles, but it feels about right for her, too. Nice. Not completely useless.

The bus pulls away, headed for California without her. Hopper drives Robin home in silence.

* * *

**_(May, 1980)_ **

Robin _loves_ Star Wars.

Sometimes, when she’s putting together her clarinet, she pretends she’s building a lightsaber; she teaches herself to play the melody _and_ the clarinet part of every single theme from the score. She’s got all the Kenner action figures—even Hammerhead and Snaggletooth—and she went to see it about a dozen times before it left theaters. It feels… hers, a little bit. The ships roaring in overhead. It’s like her dad says: a part of her has always belonged in outer space.

So when her parents take her to the theater to finally, finally see the sequel, she doesn’t have the words to articulate the odd, disappointed anger that saturates her veins as she watches as first Luke, then Han, then _Lando_ —who the heck is _Lando?!—_ and then Han again kiss Leia within the span of two hours. Since when is Star Wars about that?

It’s not that she didn’t like it, even. Seeing Luke train to be a Jedi with Yoda was amazing, and she’ll be thinking about the Vader reveal for the next… ever, probably.

But just. Why do they have to _touch_ Leia for her to matter?

“So what’d you think?” Mom asks as they leave the theater, knuckles bumping against Robin’s. She’s a little too old to need to hold hands with her parents in a crowd, but it’s nice to know she’s there.

“It was cool, I guess. But too much kissing,” she grumbles, wrinkling her nose.

Dad laughs. “If only I could freeze _you_ in carbonite. Give it a year or two, kiddo, and I think you’ll feel differently.”

Robin doesn’t think she will.

* * *

**_(June, 1982)_ **

She gives it a year. Then two.

To be fair, Robin _does_ feel differently.

But only because, well. There’s only so many times a girl can watch _Grease 2_ in theaters before she’s forced to admit to herself that the movie is perhaps, in fact, terrible, but that Michelle Pfeiffer is so fucking beautiful that it’s worth it.

For Robin, that number is four.

Robin prides herself on having good taste in movies, but she loves this one even knowing full well it stinks. Loves Stephanie’s wry smile, her unexpected vulnerability, her sarcasm. Her impossibly long neck. Something moves within Robin when Stephanie straddles that step ladder dressed in black and belts her heart out. Sure, it may a song about a dude on a motorcycle, but… to Robin, it’s an anthem: “ _If it takes forever, then I'll wait forever. No ordinary boy, no ordinary boy is gonna do—I want a rider that's cool.”_

No boy _will_ do. She’ll wait forever, if she has to.

It’s possible she gets a little overly invested in the idea, though. Of what freedom looks like; of what it means to be sexy. She makes the mistake of blurting out at the kitchen table one Sunday morning that she wants to learn how to ride a motorcycle. Dad slowly puts down his paper and looks at her quizzically over the tops of his glasses. Then he says, “Come outside with me.”

He opens the driver’s side door of the family sedan and has her step in.

“Let’s start you on something a little less likely to give your mother a heart attack,” he says. “Can you even reach the pedals?”

She stretches; flexes her toes. “No?”

He chuckles. “Move the seat up; I’ve got about a foot and a half on you, Rob.” He reaches under the seat and pulls the bar; she slides forward. Taps the tips of her Keds against the pedals.

“Okay, yeah.”

“Alright then.”

He drives them to the empty parking lot of the dentist’s office down the street, they switch places, and she practices the basics—learning which pedal is which; how to use the clutch and change gears.

Dad talks the whole time: “Let the wheel slide through your fingers as you straighten out; don’t yank. It’ll turn on its own.” “Don’t do anything too suddenly; that’ll jerk the car around. Legato, not staccato, okay?” “You have to listen. Use those genius ears of yours. The car will tell you when it wants to change gears.” She panics the first time the car stalls, but Dad keeps up his monologue, soothing and slow: “It’s alright, we’ll try it again. That’s why we’re doing this now and not a few years from now when you’re getting your permit and you’re in downtown traffic. Try it again. You’ve got this.”

It’s probably the longest conversation she and her father have ever had. And for one glorious half hour, Robin is in complete control of everything that happens to her. Even if it’s scary; even if it’s huge.

She tries to hold onto that feeling for as long as she can.

* * *

**_(November, 1982)_ **

Uncle Ian comes home for Thanksgiving, and brings his roommate Miguel with him.

The first thing Robin notices, watching from her window as they pull into the driveway, is that he has to lean on Miguel, a bit, in order to get out of the car. Like he’s weaker than he expects to be.

The second thing she notices is that Miguel lets him. That his touch lingers, in fact, in a way her hungry eyes zero in on immediately. Mentally, she amends their relationship, putting “roommate” in quotes. Wonders if this is why Mom made such a fuss about buying an air mattress even though the futon in the basement sleeps two.

The third thing she notices is that there’s a purple splotch on Ian’s neck she’s never seen before—just under his chin, at his pulse point. Where his heartbeat lives.

The sight of it scares her.

Turns out, it doesn’t scare her nearly as much as it should.

That night, Robin sits in her pajamas at the top landing of the stairs and overhears a conversation that changes the whole trajectory of her life. A conversation for which there is a Before, and an After.

Uncle Ian has gay cancer. Or, well—AIDS, really, is what they’re calling it. He’s known for a while now, but didn’t know how to tell them over the phone. The purple spot on his neck is a Kaposi’s Sarcoma lesion; his back and chest are covered with them. No one’s sure how he got it but everyone knows the illness largely affects people like him and Miguel. Men who love men.

It’s not like Robin’s never heard of these things before, but it all seemed so impossibly far away. Something that other people got to be; that other people were afflicted with. It wasn’t supposed to be _Ian._

A plague wasn’t supposed to just show up on their doorstep.

Her parents don’t seem all that surprised, which means—they knew. They’ve known this whole time, that he’s like this, that he _is_ this, and she’d had no idea. And at the same moment she realizes she’s not alone, she realizes that before too long, she will be. Because Ian is dying.

Ian is gay, and he’s dying, and her parents don’t seem to want to acknowledge either one of those facts.

Still… it could be worse. They don’t kick him out, or even really kick up much of a fuss. They ask him vague, stilted questions and end the conversation as quickly as they can, and the whole weekend is just weird after that. Hollow and artificial, like they’re pantomiming being themselves for a sitcom. Conversation at dinner never really scratches beyond the surface. None of her other uncles drop by, though normally they would. There is no family tackle football game in the snow on the lawn. They don’t have enough people to play, and even if they did… Ian is fragile, now. Unsteady on his feet.

Robin hugs him as tight as she possibly can when he leaves, sobbing into his shirt.

“You’ve gotta let me go, Rob,” he whispers into her ear—he can do that, now, after her growth spurt, just lean down a little and whisper, still standing—“I’m gonna miss my flight.”

She feels like if she lets him go she’ll never see him again. “You’ll write to me, won’t you?” she demands, trying to get ahold of herself. “Pen pals?”

“Of course, _bijou._ Always.”

She stands in the driveway in the bitter cold, waving, until Miguel’s rental car is nothing but a speck in the distance.

* * *

He’s good to his word. Though their correspondence had waned a bit in the intervening years since he left, now that she knows she’s on a time limit Robin writes Ian every week. She writes him the most important things she can think of—her deepest thoughts, her innermost feelings.

When she tells him about Grease 2, he sends her a postcard in response. The front side is a photo—a rainbow in the mist over the Golden Gate bridge. On the back is written a single sentence, in his sprawling, loopy handwriting: _One day you’ll be out with me in sunny San Francisco._ An innocent nothing to anyone else who’d see it, but everything to her.

Two days later, a package postmarked from Walt Whitman Bookshop appears on the Buckleys’ front porch. Inside is a dog-eared bundle of books—a complete set, used, of Colette’s _Claudine_ series, untranslated. Included in the parcel is a bookmark, upon which is written in familiar penmanship _To practice your French ~~ing~~._

So she does. She practices her French, and she teaches herself Spanish, to boot, using it to talk to Miguel long distance for updates. Ian never mentions a word about his illness in his letters, so conversations with Miguel are the only way to know how he’s really doing. When her parents ask who she’s talking to on the phone all the time, she says it’s homework; that she has to call someone and carry a conversation for ten minutes without using English.

She’s sure her parents knew, once, that she takes Italian.

* * *

Here’s a list of things Robin can say in Roane County Board of Education-approved Italian:

 _Where is the library?_

_The weather today is cloudy._

_My favorite animal is the tiger; I like its black stripes._

Here’s a list of things Robin can say in Miguel’s crash-course Spanish:

_Do you think the coughing is pneumonia?_

_Is the blindness permanent?_

_He’s lost how much weight? Try giving him teddy grahams; Mom always says it’s the one thing that didn’t make her nauseous when she was pregnant with me. Maybe it’s a Kincaid family trait._

Honestly, Robin isn’t sure she can spell _cytomegalovirus,_ but she knows, in two languages, that Ian probably won’t survive it. And if he does, then he won’t survive the next thing, or maybe—if he’s very lucky, for a given definition of the word—the one after that. The one thing anyone can say for sure about the sickness that’s got hold of her uncle is that no one makes it out alive.

Once a month, Miguel sends her a Polaroid in the mail—him and Ian, together, smiling.

In every one, there’s a little less of Ian than there was before.

* * *

A few weeks after Easter, Miguel calls. Robin doesn’t get to the phone in time, so Mom picks up. Miguel speaks English when she does, because there’s nothing to be secretive about anymore. Ian’s dead.

Robin never actually hears anyone say the words. She doesn’t have to. She watches the way her mother’s knees give out beneath her, the way she slides down the foyer wall as she dissolves into tears, and that’s it. Robin hardly needs it spelled out for her.

She knows.

She runs out to the car and turns on the radio, remembering back to drives with Ian—yearning; hoping the music will drown out her sadness. She can still hear every single song. _Surely heaven waits for you. Tell me why everything turned around. Leave ‘em burning and then you’re gone._

Instead, “Hungry Like The Wolf” blasts from the speakers, and the pure inanity of the moment has her hiccupping ironic, frustrated laughter between her tears.

The passenger door opens. Her dad slips into the seat next to her, turns down the radio to a more human-friendly volume, and murmurs, “Engine on; blinker on.” She obeys without thinking about it, and at his prompting, pulls out into the street.

He guides her through town. “Don’t accelerate towards a red light; just let the car coast to a stop. It saves gas. You don’t want to speed up to slow down, right?” “Don’t let your eyes stay in one place too long. Windshield, rearview, side mirrors, speedometer. Don’t lose track of what you’re doing and what’s around you.” “Always leave at least a full car length between you and the next person, okay? You can’t hit what you’re not near.”

Robin never stops crying the whole time. That feeling of control she once had behind the wheel never returns.

She has no interest in learning to drive, after that.

* * *

Ian’s landlord won’t let Miguel take his things, saying Miguel wasn’t next of kin, so Mom has to fly out alone to clean out Ian’s apartment. Robin had wanted to come, but they wouldn’t let her skip school; Dad didn’t want Mom to go alone, but someone had to watch Robin, and her uncles… suddenly they’re all very busy with other things.

She and Dad hardly speak to each other the whole week Mom is gone. The topic just feels too heavy to lift, too hot to touch. So they skirt around it as best they can.

Mom comes home with a cardboard box of things that she leaves on Robin’s bed. It’s books, mostly, but a few accessories, too. Leather wrist cuffs and bracelets; heavy chain necklaces. A watch. A small stack of photographs—mostly family ones that Ian took with him from Indiana when he moved, but a few are Polaroids of him and Miguel. Fewer and fewer, the more recent the timestamp—they sent most of those to her already.

She’d forgotten how _alive_ he used to look. How thin he wasn’t, once.

Dad refuses to talk about it. Sometimes Robin will come into the kitchen and catch her mom crying quietly into the dishes, but it’s not… it’s not up for discussion.

So Robin folds Ian up like a paper airplane, takes aim, and throws, until he lands in a corner of her heart she keeps locked away.

Slowly but surely, she falls out of touch with Miguel. He stops calling her, then stops returning her calls. Stops writing her back when she sends him letters. She imagines it’s painful, keeping in touch with someone who reminds him of his dead lover. And she’d like to think he’s protecting her; he’s sick too, now, and maybe he wants to spare her watching that happen again.

She’s ashamed of how grateful she is for that.

* * *

The thing about being a queer kid in Indiana is that you get really good at _not_ saying all the things you think and feel. Sometimes Robin wonders if she’s losing the ability to do it at all, now that there’s no Ian to talk to. That one day someone will ask her to speak her truth and she just won’t have the vocabulary anymore. Finding words that feel like they’re the right shape to articulate the thoughts in her head gets harder all the time.

Maybe that’s why she loves other languages so much, she thinks. The nuance. The act of translation. Even if you can’t say exactly what you mean, you can get close enough to be understood.

So she throws herself into soccer, into theater, into band. Hoping maybe the movement of her body, her voice speaking the words of others, the artistry of notes on paper becoming sounds in the air, will say all the things she cannot.

Or maybe she’s just keeping herself quiet.

* * *

**_(August, 1983)_ **

Two weeks after her fifteenth birthday, Robin says the bravest thing she’s ever said in her life:

“Do you, um… want to go on a walk?”

The last eight weeks at band camp have been like scenes out of someone else’s life. People _like_ Robin here. They have ever since day one, when Mrs. Parisi couldn’t find her pitch pipe and Robin was able to sing the note, just like that. At home, people call her a freak and a show off when she uses her perfect pitch, but here… it makes her popular. It makes people notice her.

Robin notices people, too.

Mostly she notices Caroline McConnell.

She’s never thought of the clarinet as _sexy_ before, and yet… she finds herself watching Caroline all the time. Sticking her reed in her mouth as she puts together her clarinet; the tendons of her hands and the strength of her fingers as she plays through a piece. And if the way she notices Caroline is distracting in rehearsal, it’s downright debilitating during the rest of camp. The sun in her blonde curls as they go hiking. The pale lines that crisscross her shoulders, where her tan ends and the various tracks of her bra straps or bikini ties begin, none of them falling in quite the same place. Her laugh.

So. On the last night of camp Robin decides to take a chance, because there’s no risk—she’ll never have to see Caroline McConnell again, if it all goes wrong.

But it doesn’t go wrong.

“Yeah. Yeah, let’s take a walk.”

They slip out of the cabin, Robin having the foresight at the last second to grab a flashlight. It’s a new moon, so once they get past the warm glow issuing from the cabin windows, it’s just about pitch dark beyond the narrow beam of Robin’s torch. On instinct, Robin’s feet begin to lead her down the trail towards the lake; Caroline follows without a word. The night is alive around them—the air filled with the shrill whine of cicada-song, a warm wind rustling through the trees.

It’s weird that no one’s talking. Shouldn’t they be talking? God, she’s screwing this up—

“What note is that?” Caroline asks out of nowhere.

Robin nearly trips over her own feet at the unexpected question breaking the moment. “Um, what?”

“The cicadas.”

She pauses; listens. “Oh, E. It’s an E major chord. Well—basically, anyway. Some slacker cicadas are flat.”

Caroline chuckles and shakes her head. Robin’s eyes snag on the way her dimples are amplified in the low light, the shadows catching in their depths. They start walking again. “It’s so crazy how you can do that.”

“Not really. It’s no different than knowing the words to your favorite song. They’re not gonna go anywhere once you know them.”

She can’t make out the look in Caroline’s eyes in the dark. “If it were that easy, Robin, anyone could do it. You’re special.”

At least the night hides her blush. “Well, it’s both a blessing and a curse, then. The radiator at school is totally dissonant with the florescent lighting—drives me up the wall. Every day in winter is like one long crunchy chord.”

“See, like. That. That sounds like the kind of thing someone would tell Professor Xavier they noticed before their powers manifested. _No one_ could hear that.”

“I’m not a _mutant—_ ”

“Maybe, maybe not. But if those genius ears of yours save a life one day I’m gonna say I told you so.”

Robin thinks about her crash course in Spanish; thinks about the sound of a clarinet across a French dance floor.

“Yeah, okay,” she mumbles.

“Here, c’mon,” Caroline says, and she grabs Robin’s hand, and—and they’re holding hands, just like that. Caroline tugging a little as she leads Robin towards the dock.

When Caroline drops Robin’s hand, it’s to bend down and start untying her shoes.

“Wh-what’re you doing?” Robin asks, a nervous waver in her voice.

“I just wanna dip my toes in the water. Relax, I’m not trying to go skinny dipping or anything.”

Well great. Now that’s the only thing she can think about. Robin clears her throat, hard, and sits down beside her. The water is cold at her feet.

In the days, weeks, years to come, Robin will run through every word of this conversation a thousand times, like it’s a scene from a favorite movie. They don’t even talk about anything important, really. Whether or not they’ve started thinking about college yet. Whether Beethoven or Brahms is more fun to play. It would be a perfectly normal, downright boring conversation, except for the part where Caroline’s hand is resting on top of Robin’s. Except for the part where their feet keep bouncing off each other where they’re swinging under the dock. Except for the part where one of the sentences in this perfectly normal, downright boring conversation is _Can I kiss you?_ and the sentence right after it is a single word: _Yes._

And for a few glorious minutes, Robin’s entire universe is quiet touches beside the boat house and the taste of another girl’s mouth. No sounds in the world but the gentle lapping of the lake against the dock, the cicada chorus, her own heart roaring in her ears, and the softest smack of lip gloss. Nothing but trees, and lightning bugs, and somehow, impossibly, her and Caroline under the stars.

The next day, they wait together on the grass, watching as other kids’ parents pick them up one by one. They sarcastically the narrate carside reunions and tearful partings of summer-close friends whose conversations they’re too far away to hear. All around them, campers exchange contact information, promising to write, to call.

Robin doesn’t offer an address, or a phone number. Caroline doesn’t ask.

She wishes she could hold Caroline’s hand, but there’s no way—there’s too many people, too many eyes. So they sit side by side under the flag pole, cross-legged, their bare knees just barely brushing against one another if they lean the wrong way. (The right way.)

Eventually, the moments ends; the McConnells drive up in a blue station wagon. (It’s a long, long time before Robin forgets the plate. W84-M3R. Just letters and numbers, just nonsense, but it had read like a prayer: _wait for me, Robin_.) Caroline shoots up to greet them, placing her hand palm-down at the junction of Robin’s thigh as a pivot point as she climbs to her feet. Robin would get up, too, but she’s frozen to the spot—suddenly blushing to her ears, her whole leg awash in pins and needles. No one’s ever touched her like that before, with such casual, thoughtless intimacy. Especially not _there._

It’s the last time anyone touches Robin for almost two years.

* * *

It’s not like she means for it to happen. At least, not at first. But she sees the graffiti on the bathroom walls; she hears the way people talk about Barbara Holland. (And like. She has _eyes,_ she sees the way Barb looks at Nancy Wheeler. No wonder people talk.) When Jonathan Byers’ little brother goes missing that fall, people are more interested in calling the kid a fag than in helping him get found.

And no, Robin doesn’t join the search parties. Because if they’re right about Will Byers, she hopes he’s run as far from this town as it’s possible to run and that they never, ever find him. She hopes he’s safe, of course, but mostly she hopes he’s _free._ It doesn’t feel like coincidence when Barb disappears two days later.

(Robin sobs her heart out when they find Will’s body, because he was too young to die. She sobs even harder when he somehow comes back from the dead, because Ian was too young, too, and there’s nothing she wouldn’t give to make that be a magic trick that works more than once. They’re living in a plague, and no one cares in Indiana. People call Will _Zombie Boy,_ like he’s a freak and not a miracle. It’s all Robin can do to tune them out.)

So anyway, it’s just—easier. To not go in for the victory hug with the girls in soccer; to shy away from offers to braid hair and paint nails when her friends in band invite her over for sleepovers. To put her hands on her hips instead of over Monica and Cindy’s shoulders when Jonathan comes by to take the yearbook picture of the drama club. She actually _has_ friends now, sort of; why risk it? The best way to not be seen as some kind of locker room skeeve is to take touch out of the equation entirely.

It’s like Dad said. You can’t hit what you’re not near.

* * *

Steve Harrington is in Mrs. Click’s history class with her that year. Even though he’s a junior, and it’s literally called _Sophomore History._ Says it right on her schedule.

It’s fine, really. Because hating Steve Harrington, obsessing over him, gives her something to do that isn’t crushing on Tammy Thompson—and she desperately, desperately needs things to do that aren’t crushing on Tammy Thompson.

It would be a little less mortifying, she thinks, if Tammy Thompson were actually, like, an objectively interesting or talented person. Even Robin can admit that she’s not. But what she is, though, is beautiful. And more than that, she’s _nice._ The kind of nice where she asks people before class how their weekend was and actually cares about the answer; the kind of nice where when Mrs. Click tells everyone to split into groups of four, she’ll nod Robin over to work with her and Jenny M. and Vanessa Cruz. And she smells good, and she’s got this killer smile, and sometimes Robin wishes she’d never kissed Caroline McConnell, because then she wouldn’t know what it felt like, and she’d have nothing to miss. As it is, she _does_ know, and when Tammy smiles, the memory is torture.

So yeah, it’s a lot simpler to hate Steve Harrington than to think about any of that. With his stupid hair and the effortless lounging grace in his lanky limbs and the way people fall all over themselves around him. He makes it easy, when he gets bagel crumbs everywhere and won’t stop asking questions like _why Lincoln debated Douglas when they were both abolitionists_ because, apparently, he is not capable of remembering that Stephen Douglas and Frederick Douglass were two different people. You’d think, at the very least, he’d be able to keep track of which historical figures were fellow annoying white guys named Steve.

But apparently he’s not, so Robin hates him with the same frustrated, simmering _Why are you like this?_ passion with which she’d once hated _Empire Strikes Back._

(In hindsight, she should have seen it coming. The switch. _Empire_ grew on her, too.)

* * *

Junior year, she doesn’t have any classes with Steve Harrington, thank goodness. And she only has study hall with Tammy, so most days she skips or hides out in the library.

She’s starting to feel… hollow. Not depressed, even, just. Vacuous inside, like a husk of a person, all surface and extracurricular activities and nothing going on underneath. She doesn’t get cast in _The Crucible_ , so she paints sets to look like Puritan Massachusetts and tells her parents it’s fine, it gives her more time to practice clarinet anyway. Tommy C. in band asks her out; she tells him it’s nothing personal, she just can’t date dudes named Tommy ever since Tommy H. made fun of her in elementary school. He makes a face, cute and understanding and disappointed, like she’s not the first girl to tell him that. She thinks it’s a face she’d like, if she were capable of it.

“Just you wait,” he vows. “I won’t let him besmirch the good Tommy name. One day, he’ll try to be a dick to someone and they’ll say _You know, it’s a good thing Tommy C. was so nice to me in Chem and therefore nothing could ruin this name for me. Maybe I’ll name my son Tommy._ ”

“Good luck with that,” she says, and he laughs like she made a joke even though she didn’t, and—it would be so easy, it would be _so much easier,_ if she were a Tommy person and not a Tammy person. If she could just go out with Tommy C. and his cute face and like it.

But she’s not, no matter how hard she wishes. So she makes her excuses and she paints sets until soccer season starts, and then she does that instead.

In the state championship qualifier, one of the strikers from Milldale East slips on the ball and slides into the goal area cleats-first, slicing the shit out of Beth Wildfire’s knee as she kicks her legs out from under her. Beth goes down hard, bleeding, bone exposed to the open air, and Robin stares and stares and stares.

And it’s not like she wants that to happen to her, she’s not an idiot, but. A part of her wonders what it would be like. To be reminded of all the ways you’re flesh and blood. To be certain there’s something solid inside you.

Sometimes it feels like there are so many empty spaces inside Robin, she has to worry she might cave in.

* * *

Robin skips Junior Prom, but she decides to go to the after-party at Jason Pemberton’s place, because—whatever, no dress code and free booze.

It’s easy to tell the latecomers like her from the prom kids, because the prom kids are still dressed up in their fancy clothes, and are about twice as drunk on average. Jason’s made his backyard patio into a makeshift dance floor, music pounding, and Tammy Thompson can be found right in the middle of it, jumping up and down and singing along off-key to DeBarge’s “Rhythm of the Night.” Her low-cut dress and the way she’s bouncing means that it’s—well, everyone’s got to be staring at her chest, right? Not just Robin.

The song changes to “Material Girl,” and Robin ducks into the kitchen to get a drink, because she’s way too sober for this. Inside, Nancy Wheeler is holding court, talking about the internships she and Jonathan Byers have gotten at the newspaper over the summer. Robin tries to get in and out as soon as possible, tuning out the sound of other people’s perfect lives.

The beer tastes awful. Almost metallic—like she’s licked around the rim of the keg. She downs a red Solo cup full and then pours herself another before heading back outside.

There’s a fire going at the far end of the backyard; figuring it might be a little quieter and more tolerable over there, she winds her way around dancing idiots and necking couples to find a spot to sit and think.

“Robin!”

Or not.

Tommy C. meets her eye across the fire pit and points at her like he’s calling his shot at the plate, long arm extended. “Robin Buckley!” The way he looks at her… he’s beaming. Like just getting to look at her has made his night. He fights through the crowd to get to her, stumbling as he goes. His undone bowtie hangs loosely around his lapels.

He’s unmistakably wasted.

“Tommy. Thomas Cociarelli,” she greets back in a somewhat less enthused voice, but in her defense he set a very high bar.

 _“You_ were not at prom,” he accuses, loping up to her. He’s listing slightly to starboard.

She shrugs. “No one asked me.”

He sputters, like this is an injustice so unthinkable he’s been rendered speechless. “That’s—but you’re—I would’ve—”

“It’s really okay. Prom’s not exactly my scene, anyway.”

He quiets at that. “No,” he agrees, his voice soft and fond. As if he knows a single thing about her. “No, it wouldn’t be, would it?”

“Did I miss anything good?”

“I mean. The little hot dogs were pretty sweet. The DJ sucked, though.” He reaches into the inner pocket of his suit jacket and removes a flask, offering it to her. Figuring anything would be better than the tinfoil beer she’s drinking, she takes a swig, finding the rum within to be heavy and sweet on her tongue. She swallows another pull before handing it back. “Would’ve been better if you were there,” he says, and—what? Oh, right. Prom.

“I doubt that.”

The song changes to Bryan Adams’ “Heaven,” causing the couples to cheer and the single kids to boo loudly. Robin stares at the fire and doesn’t look at any of them.

“When are you gonna let me show you a good time, Robin Buckley?” Tommy asks, so earnest it makes gooseflesh erupt across her forearms.

She downs the rest of her beer and makes a decision. “How about now?”

He blinks. “Seriously?”

“Go ahead. Rock my world.”

A slow, satisfied grin overtakes his face. “Oh, you’re so on.” He grabs her wrist and all but drags her across the lawn, inside, and up the stairs.

 _This is easy,_ she tells her thundering pulse, begging her body not to freak out. _It’s easy. He’s nice. He likes you. Just let him touch you._

He finds an empty bedroom and closes the door behind them, smiling broadly. She throws herself at him, lips crashing into his in a violent, needy kiss. Begging herself to get something out of it.

But it’s—nothing. Nothing but wet, and desperate, and kind of sad. He’s all over her, though, and clearly enjoying himself, and Robin finds herself somehow outside of her body as they make out.

“Clothes stay on, okay?” she mumbles against his lips, because there’s only so far she’s willing to go for science.

“Yeah, sure. Okay. C’mere; lay down with me.”

They clamber onto the bed and kiss some more, teeth knocking together awkwardly. He keeps trying to guide her hips with his hands; it takes her way too long to realize he’s inviting her to grind on his thigh. It’s not like she’s never touched herself before—she closes her eyes and tries to pretend that’s all that’s happening. Pressure is pressure. Hands are hands. Who cares who they belong to, really?

But. She does. She cares. So she mechanically moves her mouth and shifts her hips until sweet Tommy Cociarelli, first chair trombone, jizzes in his pants because she vaguely participated in sitting in his lap while he kissed her.

“That good? You good?” he asks muzzily into her neck, like he thinks she, too, might have come from the way he’s pawing at her.

“Yeah, I’m great. Let’s get back to the party, huh?”

She has three more drinks before she bails, but nothing gets the taste of him out of her mouth. Not trusting any of these people to drive her home, she walks the two miles back to her house and spends the rest of the weekend holed up in the bathroom—alternating between vomiting her hangover away and taking scalding-hot showers in an attempt to scrub the creepy-crawly feeling of regret off her skin.

Her big reward for all of that is a newly-minted reputation for being easy. The last weeks of school are filled with lewd comments and inappropriate touches in the hallway from guys she doesn’t even know, hands too familiar and too close.

“I’m really sorry, Robin,” Tommy has the decency to say, finding her under the bleachers one day while she skips gym. “It wasn’t supposed to get around like that, but I was just so buzzed at the party, and I guess I must have told a few guys what happened. I wasn’t trying to brag or anything—I mean, I _was,_ but—only because, y’know. I like you. But when I tell them to knock it off it just gets worse.”

She knows a last chance when she sees one. She could forgive him, in this moment, and ask him to go steady. She knows he’d agree. It wouldn’t stop the rumors, but it would head off the _true_ rumors at the pass. Give people something else to talk about. He’s a nice kid. A good guy.

But she can’t bring herself to open her mouth.

He toes at the ground, correctly interpreting her silence but giving it his best shot anyway: “Don’t suppose you want to go to a movie sometime?”

She bites the inside of her cheek so hard she tastes blood. “Probably better if we don’t.”

“Figured,” he says, nodding sadly. “Well—see you around.”

Summer break literally can’t come fast enough.

* * *

**_(June, 1985)_ **

When she interviews for the job at Scoops Ahoy, she plays it safe. She shaves her legs, and wears a flowery summer dress that falls below the knee, and she brushes her hair for once. She says all the right things, too—about responsibility, and being a hard worker, and wanting to fit in with the company. They hire her on the spot.

Then she sees the uniform.

Before her first day of work, she stares at herself in the mirror for ages, not recognizing this weird corporate sailor-girl they want her to be. Like a reject from a community production of _H.M.S. Pinafore,_ or something. No, worse. Like some demented back-up dancer from a lost Shirley Temple film about extremely anachronistic pirates, left on the cutting room floor. She’s been all surface and no substance for so long, trying on identities as it suits her, but… the idea of putting on this mask and being _this_ person makes a roar of protest well up from deep inside of her.

She has to draw the line somewhere.

So she digs under her bed and pulls out a long-ignored box, and one by one, puts on every necklace chain and bracelet Ian left her. If she’s going to do this, she’s going to do it as _Robin._ She’ll retain an iota of personality any way she can.

(Maybe that’s the real gift Ian gave her, she thinks. A person to be, underneath all the bullshit. Maybe she’s let herself forget that.)

No more blending in. Because if she doesn’t find a way to be Robin again, she’s afraid she might wake up one morning and discover there’s no more Robin left to be.

* * *

When she finds out one of her fellow “nautical dairy engineers” for the summer is Steve Harrington, she expects—okay, fine, maybe even looks forward to—a series of fawning girls coming to visit him as a silver lining. One small pro to make the rest of the cons worth it.

She does not expect the children.

(In hindsight, there were signs. Band kids are required to play at graduation, and from the orchestra pit Robin had watched as an entire row of rugrats stood up and cheered when Steve’s name was called. He hadn’t blushed or ducked his head or glared at them, like most seniors had when their families embarrassed them; he’d grinned like a lunatic. On any given day, if you see Steve’s Beamer in town, you can bet there’s some kid riding shotgun, fighting with him over the radio. There were signs.)

But what’s worse is that she thinks she might actually—god help her—enjoy his presence? Against her better judgment, she starts looking forward to her shifts with Steve. He might be her favorite coworker.

It’s hardly her fault; her other options are terrible. The shifts she shares with Matt, their supervisor, or Abigail or Dylan are excruciating. Matt’s a junior at State, and he never shuts up about how he’s only home for the summer and how he’s majoring in Economics and he’s gonna get rich on Wall Street as soon as he’s done with college. Abigail is—fine. A grandma who used to work at the toy store on Main before it closed down, unable to compete with Starcourt. She’s endlessly patient with kids who ask for samples and then leave without buying, which is sweet but maddening, as they get _no_ tips when she’s around. And Dylan…

Dylan’s on the basketball team, and he knows exactly how Robin spent the after-party at Jason Pemberton’s, and he won’t let her forget it.

One day Steve comes in a little early for his shift, and catches an earful of the kind of crap Dylan says to her on a regular basis. He doesn’t say a word, just frowns a tiny frown like he finds the whole thing distasteful. Robin makes a run for it as soon as it’s time to clock out, and tries to put the entire experience out of her mind.

The next day she’s scheduled to work with Dylan, though, Steve is there instead.

“You and Dylan swap shifts?” she asks, trying to sound neutral and uninterested.

“Nah, I reported him to Matt. He was fired on Tuesday.”

Robin freezes. “What?” She didn’t ask for that; never wanted him to do that. Now people will say she’s a snob _and_ a slut.

“Dude kept licking all the ice cream scoops when he thought people weren’t looking. That shit’s not sanitary; we serve kids here.”

Steve says it with a casual shrug, carefully looking down at the counter he’s wiping and not at her.

“Oh. Well. Good riddance, then,” Robin says, quieter than she means to.

“Good riddance,” he agrees.

* * *

On the good days, when it’s slow, Robin can get away with mere boredom. She fills the time drawing patterns on the toes of her Chuck Taylors, switching to playing dots and boxes against herself with the freckles on her arm when she runs out of room. She compulsively scrapes off her nail polish, and picks at the scabs on her knees (because having to shave her legs for these stupid uniform shorts when she literally works behind a counter and is never seen by customers from the waist down is by far the worst part of her job), then covers the wounds with colorful band-aids when she can’t stand them anymore.

Those are the good days.

On the bad days, they’re swamped, and she runs back and forth from case to case scooping ice cream and restocking napkin holders until her feet blister. Apparently no one in this entire town has been taught to say _thank you;_ it surprises her, how much that gets to her.

The one thing that makes those days tolerable is Steve, which is absurd. He’s just—refreshingly candid, is all. Good with the kids, and open about how he’s working because no colleges would take him and his asshole dad insisted. Funny when he wants to be. An open book, waiting to be read.

It’s just that—she doesn’t want to like Steve Harrington.

And she _really_ doesn’t want Steve Harrington to like _her_.

( _Never again,_ she promises herself, pushing down memories of Tommy C.’s insistent, liquor-coated lips on hers, stubble-scratch against her cheeks and bile in her throat. _Not for anyone._ )

So she calls him dingus, ribs him mercilessly and tries to keep her fucking distance. No good can come of it.

But despite her best efforts, by the end of June she’s forced to admit it to herself, if not to him: she’s sort of, kind of friends with Steve Harrington. They have _inside jokes_ —if you can call a white board mocking Steve’s failures at flirting an inside joke.

God help her.

* * *

She’s literally never seen Steve happier than when Dustin Henderson walks into their shop. She’s also never heard anything quite so dumb as their plan to translate a secret Russian message and become national heroes, but she’s desperately bored and reluctantly intrigued (she _has_ always loved a puzzle), so she manages to worm her way into their little secret club.

It’s—kind of fun, honestly. There are worse people to spend a day with than Dustin, with his broad smile and easily-scandalized sensibilities. She’s having a good time.

And then she cracks a word. And then another. And then she’s staying past clock-out, past closing, because she’s so close she can almost taste it.

_The week is long. The silver cat feeds when blue meets yellow in the west._

It’s wild, how quickly a kid she’s known for about eight hours can convince her that they’re sitting on top of a genuine conspiracy. And then Steve realizes about the Indiana Flyer playing “Daisy Bell” (how did she _miss_ that? Music is supposed to be her thing!) and she feels… drawn in. Like she’s a part of something bigger than herself.

It’s all she thinks about as she rides her bike home; she barely sleeps a wink that night. She should be exhausted—it’s hard work, teaching yourself a new language and alphabet from scratch—but her head is alight with possibilities, Caroline McConnell’s voice ringing in her ears and mixing with half-memorized Russian phrases.

_Those genius ears are gonna save a life one day._

She wants so badly for it to be true.

* * *

The next day dawns overcast and dreary, and it feels a little less like torture dragging herself to the mall than it usually does. Inside Scoops Ahoy, after all, it’s neon-bright, and climate-controlled, and there’s a mystery to be solved. And she’s making good progress, even if Erica Sinclair (whom Dustin was happy to give her an extremely biased background on) insists on interrupting her with pleas for more samples while the boys do recon.

_A trip to China sounds nice if you tread lightly._

Bonkers how signing for a package of wax paper bowls can make the synapses fire.

That night she finds herself on the roof of the mall, watching armed Soviets deliver who-knows-what for god-knows-why, and when they nearly get caught she doesn’t know she’s reaching for Steve’s hand until she’s already done it. Like it’s instinct; like he’s safe.

She doesn’t know when she decided to trust him, and she spends another restless night trying to figure out just when that started, and how she can stop it. Having the whole secret room Russian caper helps; it gives her something else to focus on. So the next day, she blocks out the voice in her head saying her parents would kill her if they found out she’d left work in the middle of her shift, and dives headfirst into her investigation. It’s not like the County Recorder’s Office is open after business hours. So really, she had no choice.

She doesn’t expect to spend the second half of her day getting lectured by a ten-year old-about the wonders of capitalism, but Robin’s getting used to the unexpected.

* * *

Scratch that. Robin is _not_ used to the unexpected.

“We could stack all these boxes up on top and try climbing ‘em,” Steve suggests, keeping his voice low.

She does her best to stifle her unimpressed snort. “We’re at least a mile below ground at this point. You think these boxes will reach a mile?” She looks at him skeptically. “You think you can _climb_ a mile?”

“Well _you_ suggest something then,” he hisses, getting loud in his offense, and she reflexively shushes him before glancing at where Dustin and Erica are sleeping in a puppy pile in the corner. They slumber on, seemingly unperturbed by the fact that they’re trapped in a Soviet doom elevator with two teenage idiots and no way out.

Robin wishes she had their confidence. At the very least, she wishes she had their ability to sleep—if she’d known she’d be pulling an all-nighter hatching an escape plan while trying to keep two kids alive, she would’ve tried a little harder to get real rest the last few days. But there’s nothing to be done for it now.

She takes stock of their assets, hoping for a plan to somehow materialize out of what’s at hand. Two napping children. Steve’s box knife. The flashlights Erica taped to her helmet. Casks upon casks of mysterious green fluid. Dustin’s useless walkie talkie. The warmth of Steve’s bare knee, where it’s resting against hers.

That one gives her pause.

The last time she was this close to a guy, he was shoving his tongue down her throat. Only—she suddenly realizes with a start—that’s not true. She and Steve have been sharing space all summer now, and she’s been reaching for him, leaning on him, ever since Dustin got back. The blind panic that normally comes with proximity to a dude, it’s just not happening with Steve. And she doesn’t know why.

And she’s not the only one, apparently.

“Dustin said ‘if you die, I die,’” she remembers quietly. In the panic of the elevator drop and all the rest, she’d almost forgotten. Now it’s all she can think about. “What the hell do you have to go through with a kid to make him say a thing like that?”

“You mean besides a secret Russian conspiracy?” Steve grumbles. “Nothing. Just. This town’s fucked, that’s all.”

Robin thinks about Will Byers returning from the dead, and how Barb Holland never did; thinks about blood and bone on the soccer field.

_I’ve gotta get out of here, kid. I can’t stay in Hawkins anymore—it’s killing me._

“He seems to think you’ll get us out of here.”

“Well, someone’s got to, right?” Steve doesn’t sound optimistic so much as he sounds incredibly tired. “But I wouldn’t put much stock in it. Kid’s got shit for brains.”

“Wasn’t he literally at some science camp for geniuses?” 

Steve smiles, proud and fond. “Yeah. He was.”

Box knife. Flashlights. Green stuff. Walkie talkies.

Wait. “Couldn’t we take the batteries from Erica’s flashlights and put ‘em in Dustin’s radio?”

“He’s out of signal, not battery. No reception down here,” Steve reminds her, far gentler than she would have had the suggestion come from him.

“Shit. Right.”

They’ve got hours left until morning, still. She’ll think of something.

* * *

She’d like to say that she’s more afraid for the kids than she is for herself, but that would be a lie. The kids, if they have any survival instinct whatsoever, are safe in the ducts and on their way towards civilization at this point. Whereas she and Steve are being manhandled by soldiers, forced apart and dragged into separate rooms.

It’s the most terrifying thing that’s ever happened to her.

She shrieks Steve’s name, kicking and fighting as she tries to force her way back to him, but it’s no use. They slap her in cuffs and throw her in a cell, alone. With a start, she realizes it’s the first time she’s been away from Steve in almost 72 hours… and somehow, framing it that way is the worst part of all. She’s miles underground, with no guarantee she’ll live long enough to see her parents again, and somehow it’s Steve Harrington she’s missing when he’s the one who got her into this mess? Ridiculous. Absurd.

Yet… true.

There’s a moment, when they return Steve to her broken and bleeding, when she’s pretty sure they’re going to die. She reassures herself that at least it will be quick. That Steve’s lucky the splotches he’s covered in are bruises, not KS lesions; that she’s lucky she won’t have to waste away before it happens. There are worse ways to go than a Russian bullet, she thinks. She’s seen it in time lapse Polaroids, strung together like a flip book.

If this is death, she can face it without flinching. She can.

(Later—after—Steve will compliment her on this. Point out that she handled their whole confrontation with the KGB pretty gracefully, let alone the revelation that nightmares are real and they want you dead.

She won’t have the heart to tell him why.)

* * *

She doesn’t see them drug Steve with him behind her—just feels him jerking against the chair, whimpering in fear and pain. And then they stick a needle in her neck (right at her pulse point; she imagines a purple lesion, growing, festering) and it’s like the whole world gets warm, and drifty, and full of light.

She doesn’t know what the hell they’ve drugged her with, but she can feel it swelling inside of her. Filling up all of her empty spaces. It’s like every door she’s ever kept locked in her head opens, all at once, and the words have nowhere to go but out.

Then they leave—to give the drug time to sink in, she’s assuming.

Robin focuses on just breathing, on relishing the quiet while they’re left alone. There’s a quiet dripping noise, and a sad, nasal wheeze: Steve struggling to breathe through his injuries, and the slow ooze of blood down his face and falling to the floor.

She laughs, because if she doesn’t she’ll have a full-blown panic attack at the effort of trying to keep holding in the secrets she’s been carrying for as long as she can remember. (And god, how embarrassing would that be? To come out of the closet to the _Soviet army,_ just because they asked when no one else would dare to.)

Steve keeps her laughing, though, and holds the panic at bay. There’s no denying it, now: how he seems to just intuit what she needs from him and give it to her, without her ever needing to ask.

And… there’s a moment she can’t quite explain. She knows she’s high as a fucking kite when it happens, but it stays with her all the same. They start laughing again at something stupid, and Steve leans forward and she leans backward, and they just—fit. The back of her skull settles into the divot of his neck and cradles there perfectly, like puzzle pieces snapping into place. Like they were always meant to touch, like that, right there.

Robin’s always loved solving puzzles.

It’s the oddest thing. Robin is simultaneously the most scared she’s ever been at her life, and yet… totally at peace. Like she’s in a bubble. Or maybe like she’s been put in the right atmosphere for the first time, somewhere where she’s finally getting enough oxygen. Somewhere she can breathe easy, as long as Steve’s with her. They’re bound together for long enough that she gets used to having the warmth of Steve against her spine—so much so that when Erica and Dustin untie them and pull them apart, it feels like she’s missing a limb. The space between her shoulder blades cold and wanting at the lack of him.

Eventually, the drug fades. But that feeling—like Steve is a part of her, and that being separated from him is an intolerable, life-threatening _wrongness_ … that doesn’t.

* * *

Everything is funny when you’re high. And everything is fun with Steve—always has been, she’s forced to admit.

Well. Until it’s terrifying.

And somehow, amid all that—shoved between running for her life and running for her life again, and throwing fireworks at a monster straight out of Lovecraft—she tells him. Everything.

The fact that it’s not the scariest thing that happens to her that night is really a testament to how fucking horrifying the rest of it is.

* * *

Her hands won’t stop shaking. She’s not sure if it’s an after-effect of coming down off the drug, or repressed trauma, or whatever, but it’s fucking annoying. She pulls her shock blanket tighter around herself and leans in closer to Steve’s side. The EMTs had wanted to take Steve back to the hospital for scans, and she’d refused to let them take him alone, so… here she is. Across from them, Nancy and Jonathan confer in quiet whispers. They’d wanted to ride in the other ambulance with the girl with powers— _El_ , Robin reminds herself—but there hadn’t been room between her and Dustin’s other friends and Mrs. Byers.

A bump in the road knocks her against Steve harder than she intended.

“Oh, fuck,” he murmurs, his eyes widening.

“What—did I hurt you?”

“No, it’s just that I remembered—the fucking Russians still have my goddamn car keys.”

The parking lot of the mall had been swarming with jackbooted military types when they left. Robin’s sure they’ve swept the whole basement facility by now; Steve’s keys are probably now the property of the American government, stored in an evidence baggy somewhere.

“Do you have a spare set?”

“Yeah, at home, but…”

“Worry about it later, dingus. We still have to make sure you’re not gonna, like, keel over from internal bleeding or get a brain hemorrhage or whatever.” She hears the words coming out of her mouth and swallows hard. “Which: don’t, okay?”

“Have a hemorrhage?”

“Yeah. It’s not allowed.”

“This is nothin’. Billy Hargrove smashed a plate over my head last year—“

“He _what?!”_

“—and I was fine. I’m like a wob—a weep—”

“A Weeble?” she chuckles. “You wobble, but you don’t fall down?”

“Yeah, them,” he mumbles, tucking his head against her shoulder, and she’d be worried about a concussion except Steve thinks Gumby is called _gumbo_ on a good day. This might just be par for the course with him.

Even so, Jonathan nudges his foot against hers. “Hey. Don’t let him fall asleep.”

Unexpectedly, a protective—possessive?—instinct wells up in her, fierce and insistent. Steve is _her_ person to look out for; what the fuck does Jonathan Byers know about it? She shakes her head, as if she could expel the unhelpful thought with physical force. “Yeah, I know,” she says. “I’ve got him.” Then, reluctantly: “Thanks.”

She’s not sure how she feels about the curious, calculating way Nancy keeps glancing between her and Steve, like they’re a math problem she’s trying to solve. Before Robin can decide whether or not she wants to say something about it, the ambulance rolls to a stop and the back door opens up.

The hospital looks like a nightmare—the lot swarmed with the flashing lights of cop cars, tangles of caution tape covering everything. A window on the second floor’s been blown out.

“Shit,” Nancy groans. “I forgot we left it like this.”

 _“How?”_ Robin breathes, because she can’t imagine whatever happened here being anything less than top-tier traumatizing.

Nancy makes a noise—half scoff, half helpless laugh—and it hits Robin that perhaps Nancy’s had enough exposure to top-tier traumatizing that something like this no longer registers.

She watches as Nancy hops out of their ambulance and jogs over to the other one, Jonathan at her heels. From the look on Mrs. Byers’ face as they start talking, Robin’s sure it’s only a matter of time before the government types will be all over the hospital, too.

“Still think she’s a priss?” Steve chuckles, his chin resting on her clavicle.

Robin thinks about the look on Nancy’s face as Billy bore down on her, unblinking and immovable as she fired shot after shot to fend him off and protect her family. So wholly focused on her task that she didn’t even notice Steve and Robin barreling toward them in her peripheral vision. Like the only thing in her world was the trigger, the muzzle, and Billy at the other end of it. The Colossus of Rhodes. An Amazon.

Wonder Woman.

Still, she grins. “I was _at_ Tina’s party last Halloween, dude. She broke up with you because you _spilled punch on her?_ Total priss.”

“That’s—not exactly what happened.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

He elbows her, so she tickles him in retaliation, and that’s how the ER staff find them when they come out with a stretcher—dissolved into giggles in the back of the ambulance.

* * *

At Steve’s request, the hospital orderlies save his bodily fluid-laden Scoops Ahoy uniform in a large Ziploc instead of throwing it out. (“I’m gonna burn it in my backyard,” he tells one of the nurses, as casually as he would mention a barbecue. He gives an easy smile—charming, but not quite flirty—and Robin doesn’t know how he does that. Just finds ways to get along with people in the moments you’d most expect him to fall short. It’s some kind of strange superpower.)

He insists that she grab food while he waits for the doctor to see him, and she doesn’t have the fortitude to argue. The only thing she’s had to eat in the last 40-odd hours was a third of a bag of stale popcorn, which she’d promptly thrown up. The prospect of reheated cafeteria sludge doesn’t sound all that appetizing, but beggars can’t be choosers... and now that he’s said it, she recognizes the dizziness and head fog she’s experiencing for the hunger that it is. So she heads down to the first floor annex, unsurprised to see all the uninjured rugrats in various states of unease in the hard plastic chairs as Mrs. Byers and the mousy guy with the beard watch over them. It’s the way Erica’s leaning uncomplainingly into Lucas’s side that gets through to Robin—they missed Uncle Jack’s party, and Mrs. Sinclair’s going to be pissed. So where is she? Why hasn’t anyone called these kids’ parents?

Jesus. Shit. She should probably call her parents.

Ignoring her growling stomach just a little longer, she backtracks to the lobby payphone only to realize she doesn’t have enough change to make a call—the Russians emptied her pockets, too. And for some reason, her brain decides this is one obstacle too many. Despite everything that she’s seen, and been through, and _admitted_ tonight, it’s the stupid payphone that has Robin bursting into tears under the flickering florescent lights, utterly defeated. What’s she supposed to do now?

“Robin?” a quiet voice asks, and she turns to find Dustin staring at her with the same alarmed, uncomfortable face men always get at female displays of emotion. Ah, fuck.

“H-hey, Henderson,” she sniffs, wiping at her eyes and trying desperately to pull it together. She can be an adult a little longer for him. She has to. “What’s up?”

“I saw you leave the cafeteria. You okay?”

“Yeah, just. The fucking Russians took my pocket change. Not sure how I’m supposed to call my parents.”

Unsurprisingly, Dustin digs into one of his cargo pockets and produces a palmful of coins. “No problem; I’ve got you. Bold move, calling the parents. Ours all think we’re at a sleepover at the Byers’.”

“Yeah, I don’t think that excuse will fly in my case,” she manages to joke, and finds herself wondering what Steve’s parents think of all the time he spends with the kids. Then again, given the way he talks about his dad at work, the answer might be that they neither know nor care. “Especially considering I never came home from my last shift yesterday and then my work blew up.”

Dustin smiles, then his face goes soft and serious—an expression he wears all too easily. “You can’t tell them.”

“I know.” The jackbooted military types had made that _very_ clear. Before they’d been willing to give them so much as a Band-Aid or a bag of ice, they’d shoved all sorts of official-looking papers at her to sign, drilling her on the cover story and letting her know on no uncertain terms that if she wants any kind of a life beyond the Starcourt Mall, she’ll stick to it. “It’s not like they’d believe me, anyway.”

Dustin steps forward and—after a quick _May I?_ sort of a look she answers with a baffled nod—envelopes her in an unexpected, arm-trapping hug.

 _“We’ll_ believe you,” he says, voice muffled by the polyester fabric of her uniform sleeve. “Whatever comes next, whatever happens. You’re a member of the party now. We’ll believe you.”

Robin barely knows what that means, but finds herself getting misty-eyed all over again just at his vehemence. “I appreciate that, you strange, strange child. But right now I’ve gotta make this call.”

Dustin gives a last little squeeze before releasing her and retreating back to the rest of his friends.

Time to face the music.

The phone barely finishes its first ring before her mom picks up frantically on the other end. “Robin? Robin, is that you?”

“Yeah, Mom. Hi. It’s me.”

“Where have you _been?_ Your father’s been out looking for you for hours. I wanted to go too, but you know what Chief Hopper said, someone’s got to stay and man the phones—”

“I didn’t run away,” Robin objects, chest seizing at the mention of Hopper. He hadn’t meant anything to her, not compared to these kids, but—she’d been a scared kid, too, once. And Hopper had been there for her then.

“Well how were we supposed to know? You never came home last night, and then the mall was on the news like there was some sort of explosion—”

“It was a fireworks accident. But I’m fine, Mom, really, they just sent everyone to the hospital as a precaution—”

“You’re at the hospital?!”

“Yes, but I’m fine, I just—”

“Stay exactly where you are. I’m coming to get you.”

Robin opens her mouth to respond, but isn’t fast enough to beat the click and dial tone. Shit.

She’s going to have to come up with a reason why she never came home—a reason that isn’t _I got trapped in an elevator because of a secret Russian invasion._ But maybe—actually?—sure. That would work. She and Steve stayed late to close, and got trapped in a service elevator in the mall after hours. The emergency phone wasn’t working, so no one could release them until morning, and then she had to stay for her next shift, and then the accident. There just wasn’t time to call. Her parents won’t like it, but they’ll probably believe it. What choice do they have?

She spends the fifteen minutes until her mom screeches up practicing her alibi until she can almost believe it herself. It’s not hard, given how much more feasible it is than what really happened—Soviet superweapons and a spider monster made of dissolved human flesh. Of _course_ she got trapped in a service elevator. Of course it was just a fireworks accident.

Her mom doesn’t give her any time to say goodbye to Steve before dragging her into the car, but somehow it’s the worry and fear coming off Mom in droves that bothers Robin most. She’s got her parents. The kids have Mrs. Byers.

Who’s going to come for Steve?

* * *

Robin showers so long the water runs cold, and changes into pajamas with relish. Clean clothes. She’s never realized how much she takes for granted the fact that she gets to wear clean clothes.

She expects to sleep like the dead after everything that’s happened—she’s hardly gotten any shut-eye since July began—but her rest is fitful and uneasy, interrupted by ominous dreams. She’s scared to be asleep, but just as scared to wake up alone; her body misses Steve with phantom limb desperation, skittish and terrified every time it has to realize all over again they’re apart.

What is _happening_ to her?

It feels like she’s only just slipped into real sleep when the sound of knocking wakes her up. She rolls over to find her bedroom filled with sunlight, the scent of French toast drifting in through the crack under her door.

“C’m in,” she groans, sitting up and trying to tame her hair out of its wild halo of tangles.

Dad enters bearing a tray of breakfast and a nervous smile. _“Salut, mon bijou. Ça va?”_

Oh, right. The price of homemade French toast, in the Buckley household: you’ve got to speak French as you eat it. When she was little, it was a game Grand-mère devised as incentive to help Robin pick up the language. Now, it’s just long-ingrained tradition.

She considers the question. In the last 24 hours, she’s been kidnapped and tortured by Russians, fought extra-dimensional monstrosities, and—perhaps scariest of all—come out, out loud, to another human being. A feat she never even managed with Uncle Ian or Caroline McConnell.

Is she okay?

Or, maybe more accurately… can she tell her dad if she’s not?

 _“Ça va mal,”_ she admits with a pout, making grabby hands for the plate. _“Mais je meurs de faim.”_

He laughs a little and sits next to her on the bed. Robin digs in like a woman possessed, barely processing the flavors of maple syrup and cinnamon as she stuffs herself. The food is hot and satisfying going down, settling her stomach like nothing has in days. _“Merci,”_ she manages to mumble between swallows.

 _“Mon plaisir,”_ he shrugs, waving her off. _“Mais… tu nous a vraiment eu la trouille._ _Est ce que je peux aider à ce que c'est? Les mauvaises choses?”_

She shakes her head. _“Non. C’est les choses_ carbonite. _”_ She says it like it’s French—‘car-bon-eet’—though she has no idea if that’s accurate.

Dad blinks owlishly for a second before getting the reference. _“Ah. Des Problèmes de Filles Adolescentes. Je vais laisse ça à Maman.”_ He squeezes her shoulder before standing and heading for the door, where he pauses, uncertain. _“Mais tu sais que tu peux tout nous dire, pas vrai?”_

And she considers doing it, right then and there. _Je suis lesbienne. J’aime les femmes._ She could say it, have it be true in two languages. Keep her streak going of actually telling people out loud.

 _“Je sais,”_ she says instead, and busies herself again with her breakfast.

* * *

She bikes to the hospital, after she’s eaten. She doesn’t have a plan—unless letting Steve ride on her handlebars counts as a plan—but she _needs_ to see him, like a physical ache. And besides… she doesn’t think anyone else has considered that he needs to get home.

He’s her responsibility, now.

The front plaza is still marked off with caution tape, but all of the blood and broken glass has been cleaned up. It’s weird; you’d never know anything truly bad had happened. She’s starting to understand that maybe all of Hawkins is like that, if you know where to look.

The nurse at the station tells Robin that she’s got good timing; Steve’s just been cleared for release. The walk to his room takes no time at all, and then she’s pushing through the door, desperate. Suddenly scared she’ll have missed him, or he’ll have disappeared into thin air.

But no. He’s lying on the bed in his thin paper gown, watching whatever dumb soap opera is on TV. His face is a disaster—half-swollen, all mottled purple and green.

It lights up when he sees her.

“Robin!” She can’t remember the last time anyone looked quite so pleased to see her. “Hey.”

“Hey yourself. How’re you doing, slugger?” she asks, sinking into the chair at his bedside.

“Peachy. You should see the other guy,” he mumbles. His fat lip has gotten worse overnight, turning his speech into a strange lisp. “You look good, though. All punk or whatever.”

It’s hardly the first time Steve’s seen her out of her Scoops uniform—they shared a class for an entire year, for Chrissake—but it _is_ probably the first time he has since he’s registered her as, like. A person. She fiddles with one of Ian’s wrist bands, bashful.

“Thanks. Not quite as fashionable as what you’re wearing, but we can’t all pull off napkin chic.”

“It emphasizes my best asset.”

“Your hair?”

“My ass,” he counters, grinning. “Bare to the world.”

“That’ll turn heads. I can hear the swooning from here.” But it’s a fair point—no way he’s wearing his sailor suit out of here. “But seriously, dingus. Do you need me to get you a change of clothes?”

“Nah. Mrs. B dropped off some stuff earlier when she came by for Jonathan and Nancy.”

“Why didn’t you get a ride with them?”

“Wasn’t cleared to leave. Didn’t want to hold ‘em up.” He smiles another one of his broken little grins at her. “Besides, I’ve got a better ride anyway.”

“Ugh, whatever. Go change so we can get out of here.”

He emerges from the bathroom in a soft Henley and too-short jeans she can definitely picture Jonathan wearing. It makes him look… weirdly vulnerable. He grabs the bag holding his bloody uniform and cradles it to his chest like a teddy bear—or maybe a shield. “Alright, let’s go.”

The walk back out to the parking lot is heavy in its silence. She knows she has to talk about it—about what she told him, about what it might mean, about the way he disarms her and sets her at ease—but she has no idea where to start.

By the time they pass through the double doors into the sunlight, she can’t wait any longer.

“About yesterday…”

“Which part? The almost dying? The other almost dying?”

“No, about—what I said.” _In the bathroom,_ she tries to make herself add, but the words just won’t come.

He searches her face, trying to interpret her unspoken anxiety. Gives her a gentle smile when he figures it out. “I won’t tell anyone, Robin. Promise.” The wide guilelessness of his gaze is underscored by the still-puffy bruises that halo his brow. It’s jarring—a look so soft coming from such a roughed-up face.

“I know,” she assures him quickly. “I know you won’t.” And she’s surprised to find that she is, in fact, certain that that’s true. She’s horrifically aware of the lengths he’ll go to keep her safe. “But I just… _thank you._ For. Not freaking out, or. Um.” Shit. Don’t cry. _Don’t cry._ “Or treating me any—any dif—”

“Hey.” Steve interrupts her, his voice suddenly firm. “Anyone who gives you shit for something like that, that’s their problem, not yours. Alright?”

“Sure,” she mumbles, shrugging.

Apparently this isn’t good enough for him, because he chucks her chin up with his knuckle, forcing her to look him in his ruined eyes. “I mean it. Look at what we’ve been through, huh? Life’s too fucked up to take any shit about who you _like._ That gets to go in the good column. Not the bad one.”

There’s something in his voice that gives her pause. A catch in it, like he’s repeating something someone told him before. Or like he’s trying to convince himself, too. But—that’s impossible. Wishful thinking. (He would have said something, if that were the case. If he were like her. He would have _had_ to, wouldn’t he? He was drugged.)

He’s still waiting for a response, so she squares her shoulders and gives him a nod. “Okay. Good column.”

She wonders if it hurts him to smile—if the way his grin causes little crinkles at the corners of his eyes pulls at the bruises. If it does, he gives no indication.

“You know, if you were a girl…” she trails off.

He perks up. “Yeah?”

She shoves him. “You’d still have no chance in hell.”

He flinches theatrically. “Oof! Right through the heart.” Before she has the chance to even question herself—to wonder if this is the moment she took it too far, and she should maybe apologize for constantly giving him such a hard time—he breezes past her, toward the bike rack. “So, you got a little basket for me to sit in like Yoda, or something?”

Hard as she tries, she can’t make sense of that sentence. “…What?”

“Y’know. The alien. The kid with the bike. _Call home!”_

Laughter bubbles up without her consent. “Oh my god. It’s E.T. _E.T. phone home._ Yoda is in Star Wars, dipshit.”

He frowns at her, gesticulating vaguely. “It had spaceships. And the—the music. Same difference.”

“You’re fucking hopeless, Harrington.”

* * *

They end up going back to his place, Steve balanced on her back pegs and giving her directions towards the nicer part of town. Robin watches as he digs through the hydrangeas until he finds the spare key, then follows him into the well-appointed mansion.

“I’ll give you the full tour in a sec,” he says, already trotting up the stairs. “Just give me a second to change.”

Even from where she’s standing in the foyer, Robin can tell this is the nicest house she’s ever been in. Everything reeks of sterile expense—the sort of home that’s meant to be looked at, not lived in or touched. The art on the walls is a calculated kind of tasteful, and lacks even an obligatory nod to the fact that a family lives here. No sequential frames of Steve’s school picture day photos; no mementos from vacations.

It’s—Jesus. She finds it more upsetting than she probably should, but. She thinks about her own family, and how nervous she is to tell them the truth. But at least she knows they love the _idea_ of her—the kid they think they have, even if she’s neglected to give them the full picture. With the Harringtons, she’s not so sure.

She resolves to make Steve some French toast as soon as possible.

Steve returns in his own clothes and shows her around—attic to basement, each subsequent room stuffier and even more lacking in personality than the last. He concludes his tour at the patch of grass next to the pool in the backyard. “—and here’s where I’m gonna burn the Scoops uniform,” he announces, sweeping his arm expansively to show the size and intensity of the intended bonfire. “You should bring yours, too.”

“I’d hate to intrude on a private ritual,” she quips, aiming for mocking but landing a lot closer to sincere. “You sure you want me around for that?”

He blinks at her like he doesn’t understand the question. “Of course I want you around. You’re—” He frowns, and she finds herself holding her breath in anticipation. What is she, to him? A friend? A partner in crime? His favorite coworker? Yet another doomed crush? What? “—You’re Robin,” he concludes weakly.

“I am, at that,” she agrees on her belated exhale.

He stares intently into the small ripples on the surface of the pool, as though they contain the universe’s secrets. “We should do it now. Today.”

“What, burn the uniforms?”

“Yeah.”

“I didn’t bring mine.”

“I’ll drive you.”

“Your car’s still at the mall.”

“Fine. You’ll take me, then I’ll drive you.”

“Are you _sure_ they cleared you of having any brain damage?”

“So you admit I have a brain to damage.”

“Touché.”

“But yeah, I mean it. Today. Let’s go.”

So they pile back onto her bike and she pedals to the mall. If seeing the outside of the hospital was jarring, seeing the Starcourt in the light of day is downright apocalyptic. Whole swathes of the roof are just _gone_ from where the Mind Flayer burst through or the fires broke out. There are soldiers patrolling the perimeter—how that’s supposed to fit in with their cover story, she has no idea—but they don’t give her any trouble when Steve waves his spare keys in the air and points beseechingly at his car. She wonders how different her life would be if she had this superpower Steve sometimes has: the ability to point at what you want and get it.

Anyway.

It’s a production to shove her bike into the Beamer’s backseat, but Steve refuses to accept defeat. “I’ve gotten _three_ bikes in here before when those damn kids abandoned them to go spelunking at the quarry or some shit. It’ll fit.”

With some creative maneuvering, he’s right, and she collapses into his passenger seat out of breath from the effort. “Okay, I’ve gotta know,” she says, pulling her hair back from her neck. “How did you get involved with all of this in the first place? I feel like I’ve only got half the pieces.”

“You want the long version or the short version?”

“Is there any reason I shouldn’t hear the long version?”

He shoots her an apologetic smile. “I’ll probably talk a lot more about Nancy Wheeler.”

“I’ll live.”

So Steve tells her about the Upside Down and the Demogorgon as she directs him across town to her place, his voice catching unevenly over the fact that the last time anyone saw Barb Holland alive, she was sitting at the edge of his pool.

They pull up to her house right as he’s beating himself up over the fights with Jonathan and the graffiti about Nancy at The Hawk.

“Steve, it’s fine,” she interrupts, waving at the kitchen window where she’s sure her mom is spying on them. “Tommy H. is a jerk, that’s not news. You don’t have to apologize for his shittiness. Or Carol’s.”

“No, but I should probably apologize for mine,” he mumbles, staring at his knuckles as they tighten around the steering wheel.

“You’re not that guy anymore. I wouldn’t hang out with you if you were. Now let me grab my uniform and then you can tell me all about your blossoming love affair with Dustin Henderson.”

“It’s not a love affair!” Steve hollers after her as she makes her way up the front walk. “That’s—we are finding a new phrase for it!”

* * *

Robin’s not sure which part is most satisfying: pouring the fancy vodka pilfered from Steve’s dad’s liquor cabinet all over their ruined uniforms as accelerant (“Russian shit for Russians, right?” Steve had shrugged as he grabbed the bottle), downing said vodka as the match caught on the highly-flammable polyester (“На здоровье, bitches,” Robin toasted, raising the bottle high before drinking deep), or using the flames to light the blunt Steve had rolled as quote-unquote “dessert.” The fire smells absolutely rancid—plastic and blood and puke and Flayer-guts—but it pops and dances merrily in the shade provided by the surrounding trees, supplying plenty of entertainment as they sink into their cross fade, splayed out on the grass.

“Wanna know the weirdest part?” Robin ventures, taking another swallow of vodka. She’s never had anything this smooth before—it seems unfair that rich people get to have completely different alcohol, on top of everything else.

Steve laughs, even though she hasn’t really gotten to the punch line yet. “What, none of this so far was the weirdest part?”

“No. The _weirdest_ part,” she says, enjoying the way the words feel in her mouth, “is that if none of this had happened, we’d actually be at work right now.”

Steve checks his watch, but she already knows she’s right. Their next scheduled shift was today, Friday, three to close.

“Shit,” he breathes.

“Right?”

“We need new jobs.”

 _“Shit,”_ she agrees, mind reeling. “We do need jobs. Think anywhere is still hiring, this late in the summer? Well. I guess the swimming pool is; they did just lose two lifeguards. Not that—shit. Too soon. Um. Where else? We could always try another ice cream place. Maybe that one with the big cow up Route 31. Or there’s the DQ in town, too, but I’m pretty sure Tommy C. works there, so that’s probably not the best idea. Um. I feel like I just saw a Help Wanted sign somewhere recently, though. Where did I see it…? Oh! Family Video! Their foreign film section is heinous but at least we’d be paid to talk movies all day. Or—”

It takes a second for her chemical-doused brain to push past the bruises and interpret the look on Steve’s face. She’s babbling, she knows that, but—oh.

She’s only, she realizes, been listing places they can apply to together. Like they’re a package deal. Like he wants to keep being her coworker, or seeing her this often, or hanging out with her at all.

“Sorry, I—”

“No, no,” Steve cuts her off, looking uncomfortable. “It’s just—pools really freak me out, now. I mean _especially_ now, after that shit with Billy, but even before. So.”

She feels her lungs inflate without her go-ahead. “No lifeguards.”

“No lifeguards,” he agrees. “But the video store, that sounded cool?”

“Okay. Yeah. Let’s do it.”

When the fire’s burned itself out, they retreat inside and plop down in front of the television. Robin absolutely kicks Steve’s ass playing along with _Jeopardy!_ as they wait for their pizza delivery, and then they spend literally the next half hour fighting over what to watch at 8—Robin wanting _The Twilight Zone,_ and Steve fighting hard for _Knight Rider._ In the end, it doesn’t really matter, though; two slices apiece and fifteen minutes of KITT and Michael bickering later (Steve’s house, Steve’s rules), they’re passed out on top of each other on the couch.

It’s the first good night of sleep Robin’s gotten in a week. She sleeps all the way through until morning—and though she wakes with a crick in her neck, Steve’s drool on her shirt, and a piece of pepperoni stuck to her thigh, she knows she wouldn’t trade it for anything. That afternoon, she and Steve swing by Family Video and browbeat Keith into giving them jobs, and… she’s actually kind of looking forward to the rest of summer.

* * *

A week later, Robin finds herself in the space between Mike and Lucas’s backyards, overseeing what promises to be an epic water balloon battle.

It feels like half the town’s come over to watch Live Aid, because the Wheelers have a cable package with MTV and a television with stereo sound. Robin, apparently, is now the kind of person who merits an invite to this kind of thing. The kids had been into it at first, but eventually grew bored of the musical acts they didn’t care about and retreated into the sunshine.

Frankly, Robin kind of wants to watch the concert, but she doesn’t mind missing Bryan Adams’ set to watch the kids absolutely roast Steve when he produces a normal, non-nail covered baseball bat from his trunk.

“Weak sauce, Harrington!” Dustin complains.

“Yeah, yeah. Listen, though: home run derby is the best way to play with water balloons. All of the splash, none of the bruises.” Seeing as Steve’s eye is only just beginning to approach the normal spectrum of colors, it’s a convincing argument. “Can’t have one of you shitbirds losing an eye or something.”

“You don’t lose an eye from bruises,” Mike whines.

“You know what I mean!”

“No one’s doing a water balloon _anything_ until you actually make the water balloons,” Nancy points out as she passes by to deliver a can of Tab to her father where he’s grilling hot dogs on the patio, and the kids eagerly set up an assembly line: Mike filling the balloons on the outdoor spigot, Dustin and Lucas tying them off, and Will fastidiously placing them into structurally-sound piles inside various bowls and buckets stolen from the Wheelers and Sinclairs.

A little further from the group, Max sits with El under the shade of an oak tree, flipping through a comic book together. They look—devastated, honestly. Robin bites her lip. It’s been easy for her to forget, in the sudden rush of serotonin that’s come with her newfound social life, just what the cost was. All Robin lost was her shitty summer job. But these two? They lost family. A father, a brother.

Robin knows what it’s like, to have someone that important from you stolen by an evil thing that eats him from the inside out.

She trots over to the girls, unsure what to say but quite certain she should probably say _something._ “What are you reading?” she asks, and winces when she hears the faux-chipper tone of her own voice. Steve makes this look so easy. Why does she sound like such a freak when she tries to be nice?

El raises an eyebrow, sullen and unimpressed. “Comic,” she says, raising the issue up like Robin’s a moron to not see that was immediately evident. Which: fair enough, but—then Robin actually gets a look at the cover.

“Is that—did they _kill_ Supergirl?” she gasps, because… what the fuck?

“It’s Crisis on Infinite Earths,” Max sniffs condescendingly, as if Robin doesn’t know what _Crisis on Infinite Earths_ is. Come on.

“Move over,” Robin says, dropping down onto the grass beside them. El flips back to the beginning as a courtesy, but Robin pages through the early stuff without care—like she gives a shit what Pariah is up to right now. She reads over their shoulders as Supergirl races against time to save Superman before the Anti-Monitor can destroy him, vowing all the while to live up to his legacy if he dies. Reads as Supergirl fights so selflessly, so recklessly against the Anti-Monitor that Dr. Light completely rethinks her own life choices. Reads as Kara sacrifices herself for Kal-El, for the multiverse, in a blaze of unnatural energy.

The last words she speaks, as she dies in his arms, are meant to console him: _I love you so much for what you are. For how good you are._

And after Batgirl delivers a moving eulogy, and Clark carries Kara’s cape-wrapped body into the peaceful dark of the stars, the comic ends asking the same question from “Declaration of the Free” that Robin realizes they’ve all been haunted by:

_Is death a door that leads to light? We cannot say._

Max wipes tears from her eyes, looking mad to have caught herself experiencing an emotion. El sits pensive and stony-faced, her expression so impenetrable Robin can’t even guess at what she might be thinking. She should _say_ something, she knows she should—something that can help heal the trauma these kids are carrying, that lets them know they’re not alone—but everything she can think of seems cliché and useless.

All these languages, and not a single word that’s adequate.

“Listen, girls, I…”

_SPLASH!_

Whatever it is she would’ve said is swallowed up by her shriek as she’s suddenly enveloped by the cold, wet shock of a well-thrown water balloon bursting against her shoulder and arm—soaking her and the comic book in her hands.

Suddenly everyone’s shouting over each other.

Steve whirls on Lucas. “What the fuck, man?” he demands, “You don’t see me hitting _your_ best friend,” but Lucas pleads innocent, “Sorry, sorry, I wasn’t aiming for her, I was aiming for _Max—_ ” even as Dustin is indignantly yelping, “You do _so_ hit Lucas’s best friend, you hit me _yesterday—”_ over Max’s furious “What do you _mean_ you were aiming for me? I’m _sad,_ dipshit!” while Mike gets all offended at all of them and starts lecturing on how people can have more than one best friend.

And—

And maybe that’s true, but.

Robin’s never had one at all. A best friend, that is.

And Steve just called her his, without even thinking about it.

The comic looks completely ruined, which upsets El in a way no one else seems to notice. So Robin takes her back inside and commandeers Nancy’s ConAir Pro Style in an attempt to blow dry the pages, the damp wood pulp pages fragile under Robin’s shaking fingers. Every time she turns off the blow dryer to let it cool down, the sounds of Simple Minds playing “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” drift up the stairs from the sitting room TV.

Honestly.

“Still good?” El asks, nodding nervously at the comic—now a little warped and dehydrated but surprisingly legible for all that, with no pages stuck together. They got to it just in time.

Robin does her best attempt at a reassuring smile. “It won’t ever be quite in mint condition again, but yeah. It’ll be okay. Still good.”

* * *

The thing about Steve is—

Well. The thing about Steve is that Robin catches herself thinking this phrase all the time, like if only she could zero in on the correct detail she could somehow boil him down to a single essence that explains all of the quirks she likes about him.

_The thing about Steve is that he genuinely has no idea what his favorite movie is, or what genres are, or why he likes the things he likes._

_The thing about Steve is that he complains when people ask him for favors, but he always, always helps them._

_T_ _he thing about Steve is that having his attention on you can make you feel like the most important person in the world._

And one thought passes through most often of all, tantamount and inarguable:

_The thing about Steve is that he’s kind of an idiot._

“Some-one saved my LIFE tonight, sugar bear… ya almost had your hooks in me, dincha’ dear…!”

Steve’s kind of an idiot, but he’s playing Elton John on the tape deck as he drives her home from work with the windows down, singing along in his Tammy Thompson Muppet voice while shooting her meaningful looks, drumming his hands against the steering wheel, and, well. Maybe it’s all a joke to him, but she feels like not a lot of Hawkins’ most popular guys would sing this.

Not that she’ll let on it’s a big deal to her.

“You sound unhinged,” she informs him at the next red light, which is an understatement. Pedestrians are giving them looks from the intersection.

“It’s a good song,” he mutters defensively, but he goes to turn down the volume after making the next left, and—no, that’s the opposite of what she wanted. She catches his wrist, holding it there.

“I didn’t say it was a bad thing,” she allows, and he grins at her.

They turn the volume further up and sing along:

_“Someone saved—someone saved—someone saved my life tonight…”_

* * *

On July 20th—just a few weeks after the battle for Starcourt—Robin turns seventeen.

She talks to Grandpa and Grand-mère on the phone in the morning, and spends the afternoon reading.

Though she swears up and down that it’s not a big deal, her parents still insist on taking her to the movies after dinner despite her best efforts—so she fills up on popcorn, and finally watches _Back to the Future_ sober. It’s… less weird, overall, but still extremely suspicious how much Marty’s mom is clearly into him.

It’s a fun enough way to spend the day, she supposes, but. It’s nothing on the feeling that lodges itself deep in her chest when they come up the driveway and find Dustin and Steve sitting on the porch swing, holding a cake.

“What…?” Robin sputters, unsure what to say, and her parents disappear into the house with happy, heart-warmed looks. The cake, Robin can now see, is homemade: funfetti, with _Happy B-Day Robin_ spelled in crumbled peanut butter cups atop the blue icing. It’s kind of a disaster, if she’s honest. The precarious stack of layers lists a little to one side, the “Robin” is written comically small because the boys clearly didn’t think through how big the letters would have to be to all fit, and there are—for some reason—nine candles on it, which doesn’t make a lick of sense.

It’s the most wonderful thing Robin’s ever seen.

“The Reese’s were my idea,” Steve says, preening. “They’re your favorite, right? You’d always steal ‘em from the topping tubs at Scoops. But the culinary artistry was all Henderson.”

“Well, my mom helped a little,” Dustin corrects bashfully.

“Like I said, an all-Henderson production. That counts _._ ” Then: “Shit, Rob, are you _crying?”_

She _is,_ which is absolutely mortifying. But it just… it hits her all at once that these incredible, fantastic morons don’t just like her, don’t just care about her—they _know_ her. It’s more than merely enjoying her company when she happens to be around; they took the time to notice. They choose her, every day.

They made her a fucking cake.

“You guys are just. So stupid,” is what she manages to warble out between sniffles.

Dustin beams. “We love you, too. But this thing is getting heavy, so make a wish already!”

Robin’s wished for the same thing on every birthday candle, penny-strewn fountain and shooting star for as long as she can remember. A prayer: _please, please, make me normal. Get me off this ride. I don’t want it to be so hard. I never asked for this. I just want to be like everyone else._

And—fuck. Isn’t that what Grand-mère always forbade? _La vraie mort,_ she’d called it. The true death. Killing yourself before they can kill you for who you are.

She screws her eyes shut, blows out the candles, and wishes:

_More of this. Just like this._

* * *

The thing about Steve is that it’s just so fucking nice to be _touched._

She hadn’t realized just how instinctive the distance she’d kept from other people had become until he vaulted over those mental barriers as though they never existed. Steve touches her thoughtlessly, casually, kindly, without any expectation that it’s more than it is. He touches her like it’s no big deal to be around her; like he’s _not_ always doing complex equations in the back of his head to determine whether or not it’s okay if their elbows brush, or if they lean on each other, or if he puts an arm around her every now and again.

She can’t really imagine what that’s like, but. She really, really appreciates it.

Maybe it’s all the time he spends with the kids, but Steve thinks nothing of just getting into a puppy pile on the floor while they’re rewinding tapes at Family Video, or kicking her bluntly with the flats of his Keds when her teasing gets too mean. He’ll interlace their fingers or guide her head to his shoulder or press a kiss to her temple and it’s _nice._

And it spreads. Every once in a while she’ll just be walking around minding her own business when suddenly there are tiny feet digging into her spine, and it’s Erica climbing on for a piggyback ride. Or Max will, with a painfully fake-casual caution Robin recognizes immediately, arrange it so that they’re always sitting near each other when Steve takes the kids out, hands knocking together as they both reach for the communal plate of fries. Even in terms of palm-to-palm contact, she’s endured more high fives from Dustin and the boys in the last few weeks than she has in her entire career as a student soccer player.

She’d had no idea just how thick the wall between her and the world had gotten until, brick by brick, Steve and his small, weird friends systematically begin to tear it down.

* * *

“So,” Mom says one weekend afternoon as she and Robin stare down the Sunday Times crossword, huddled together on the porch swing, “you and Steve Harrington sure have been living in each other’s pockets lately.” She puts down the pen and gives Robin a carefully-probing smile disguised as a teasing one. “Anything you wanna tell me?”

 _Yeah; I’m gay,_ Robin thinks. Her throat constricts painfully. “I—you’d know if I were dating someone,” she says instead. She should have realized she could only go so long with acute male attention directed her way before she got asked about it; lord knows it’s never happened before.

Mom laughs. “I know _that._ You’re terrible at keeping secrets, sweetheart. But it’s clear that you think he’s something special. Why don’t you tell me about him?”

She doesn’t know how to describe what Steve means to her without giving her mom false hope. Hell, she hardly knows how to describe it at all—their bond is something beyond words, beyond explanation.

It’s like—when you’re a little kid, and you’re playing tag, but you pick a tree as home base and so long as you’re touching it, nothing can get you. Or like when someone casually reminds you to unclench your jaw and it’s not until you relax that you realize just how tense you were in the first place—how the relief is instant, surprising and strong. Time with Steve is like that, but for her whole body. Her whole _life._ Home base. Like a dissonant chord resolving to the harmonic.

She loves him _so much._

She’ll never love him the way her mother wants her to.

“He’s my best friend,” she rasps out, her voice coming out in a whisper despite the conviction behind the words. “He’s just—really solid, you know? I can trust him with anything.”

Mom makes a small, judgmental little noise in the back of her throat. “You know I’m not one to gossip, but ‘trustworthy’ isn’t exactly the reputation he has around town.” _Around town_ means Mom’s twice-weekly aerobics classes at the Y; the mothers of half of Steve’s high school hookups take that class with her. It figures that she would decide to make inquiries.

Robin’s stomach lurches all the same. If that’s the version of Steve she’s working with, there’s no way Mom will buy this isn’t romantic. So she has two options: lie, or find another way to end the conversation. And wouldn’t you know it, the answer closest to the truth is also the nuclear option surest to get her off the porch in a hurry.

“He’s not like that,” Robin insists, “Not anymore. He’s…” She pinches the webbing between her thumb and forefinger and hits the kill switch: “He reminds me of Uncle Ian, actually. Just… a good person.”

Mom purses her lips so hard the skin around her mouth turns white. “Oh. Well, that’s. I’m very glad for you, honey.” She looks down at the puzzle again, and paints on an artificial-looking smile. “141-across is ‘ecce,’ E-C-C-E. _Behold the man._ And speaking of beholding, I’ll _be holding_ up dinner if I don’t get that chicken in to marinate. Oh, don’t look at me like that, that was funny. Finish without me, won’t you?”

And right on schedule, she retreats into the house, leaving Robin alone on the still-moving swing.

Robin mechanically writes in the answer, and skims down the clues to cross it off. _141-across: “___ homo!”_

Wherever Ian is, he thinks he’s real funny, too.

* * *

The problem with telling Keith that hiring Steve would be a way to pull chicks is that Keith, as the manager of their little kingdom, is the one who draws up all the schedules—and every shift Keith shares with Steve is, by definition, a shift that Robin can’t.

The small bright side, though, is that this means Robin gets to indulge in one of her other _things about Steve:_ he’s absolutely atrocious at telling stories or summarizing things in an even slightly coherent manner. His attempts to describe shifts without her are pure entertainment in and of themselves; she’s lost count of the number of times he’s lost the thread of his annoyance, ruined his own punchline, or spent a half hour to describe thirty seconds’ worth of anecdote.

“But seriously,” he says, wincing as she slaps his hand away from her fries over lunch, “last night was so annoying. These sophomore girls kept asking me about scary movies, and you know I’m shit at recommending stuff like that—all _okay but will someone need to hold my hand?_ How am I supposed to know?! And Keith was just glaring at me all night even though I didn’t even do anything; I just—”

“Steve,” Robin interrupts, because this is just too rich. “They didn’t want to talk about movies. They were flirting with you. That’s why Keith was mad.”

He blinks at her. “What? No. They were sophomores.”

“And you’re King Steve! Did you have a stroke?” Then, honestly: “Have _I_ had a stroke? Since when do you not know what flirting is? Literally all you ever did at Scoops was try and make girls say that shit to you.”

“Not _sophomores!_ That’s, like, almost Salt Lake Suzie territory. You think I want to make it with girls Dustin’s age?”

“I think they’ve historically wanted to make it with you,” she shrugs, popping another fry into her mouth. “Wasn’t Nancy a sophomore when you started dating?”

“That’s totally different!”

“You might have to put up signs, like an amusement park. _Must be this old to ride.”_

“We _have_ them! Kids under 17 can’t watch rated-R; there’s stickers right on the box. Like. They’re asking me about _Nightmare on Elmo Street—_ ”

“—Elm Street, oh my god, but please continue—”

“—and they can’t even rent it without a parent with them. Am I supposed to think that’s sexy? Wha—stop _laughing!”_

“Sorry, I’m sorry. This is just… really cute.”

Steve pouts and slumps deeper into the diner booth. “I just want some hot college girl to come in and ask me about the Tom Cruise movie where they bang on the train. Is that so hard?”

“My heart bleeds for you, dingus.”

* * *

The night before the Byers family leaves, they throw a party.

“Are you sure I’m not crashing?” Robin asks for the ten thousandth time as Steve drives up the wooded, quiet lane to the now nearly-empty house. They’re no longer strangers to her, this odd cast of characters that makes up the whole of Steve’s world, but—that doesn’t make her their friend. Depending on the day, _Steve_ isn’t even Jonathan’s friend. So…

“No one’s crashing anything. You heard Will.”

And, okay, true. It only took about two days of spending any real time with Will Byers to conclude that she and the rumor mill were both right about him. She hasn’t said a word about it, but somehow it’s like he’s sensed it on her; of all Dustin’s little gang, it was Will who took to her first. Which—maybe that would have been the case anyway, given the fact that Lucas was inherently suspicious of anyone Erica spent time with, Mike’s inherently suspicious of everyone, always, in that stubborn, protective way he and Nancy both are, and the girls understandably had bigger things on their minds. But still. There’s a sort of instinctive level of understanding she and Will reached early on, and when he’d turned those big doe eyes on Steve to invite him out for this shindig and said “Robin’s coming, too, right?” there was no way she could say no.

Judging by the cars around the lawn, they’re the last to arrive. Robin goes around to the trunk to grab all the chips and stuff they bought at Kroger, because—well, she doesn’t get invited to a lot of parties, honestly, and showing up empty-handed seemed rude. It’s not her first time at the Byers place, but it definitely feels… different, somehow, to merit inclusion in this last hurrah.

“Look less like I’m marching you to your death,” Steve advises, and then he’s opening the door and _Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers_ is playing when they walk in, the sound system from Jonathan’s bedroom moved into the eerily-empty living room. The kids are arguing about something esoteric over open pizza boxes, and Robin’s barely all the way into the house before Joyce is plucking the groceries from her arms.

“Oh, honey, thank you—you didn’t need to do that, we already have plenty. Are you hungry? The boys devoured the pepperoni already, but there’s tons of veggie and the three-cheese, still.”

Robin doesn’t know why she’s surprised—you only have to know Joyce Byers about thirty seconds before you feel personally adopted—but she finds herself weirdly emotional over the offer, and flickers on a smile. “That sounds great. Thank you for having us.”

The kids immediately prevail upon Steve to be their tiebreaker in whatever it is they’re fighting about (she’d thought it was over which Green Lantern was best, but Lucas won’t stop shrilly hollering about _The Karate Kid,_ so there’s definitely some crucial conversational connective tissue she’s missing), and Jonathan and Nancy are canoodling on the couch, so Robin grabs a slice and does her best to disappear into the wall.

She doesn’t have any practice at this, not really. At—mingling. Even at cast parties and stuff, there was always some _in_ she could use to make herself blend with everyone else—a funny thing Mrs. Levine said at rehearsal, or a scene that was giving people trouble. And if there wasn’t, well, there was probably beer, which worked about as well. Here, though, between the age difference and the sheer amount of trauma-bonding everyone else has gone through, striking up a random conversation seems impossible.

Before she can get too tangled up in herself, Will disengages from the group shouting match and comes over to her, leaning at her side against the wood paneling.

“Steve said you guys can’t come tomorrow, to see us off. Is that…?”

She hates to disappoint him. “Yeah, no, we have to work. Sorry we’ll miss it,” she says, surprised at just how much she means it.

“That’s okay. I was just wondering if, um, we could keep up our movie club?”

And okay, maybe she fibbed a little, before. She hasn’t _said_ a word about it, but. She’s been very particular, on the days she’s in charge of what movies they’re playing in-store and she thinks Will might drop by, to put on a certain kind of tape. Like _Rope,_ or _Cabaret,_ or _Dog Day Afternoon._ Not for any particular reason, mind you, but it’s hardly her fault if Will decided of his own volition that he liked her taste and wanted recommendations every now and then, right? It’s not like she’s handing him _The Boys in the Band._

Y’know. Yet.

“We can definitely keep up our movie club. You have my number, right? And my address?” she asks, feeling an unexpected ache in her chest at being on the other side of a now-familiar conversation. _Of course you can write to me. We’ll be pen pals._

“Yeah.”

“Good. Use ‘em, okay? I mean it.”

“Will, come on, I need backup!” Mike whines, and Will smiles a private little smile at her before rejoining the group, leaping back into the argument like he never left.

Left once again to her own devices, Robin retreats to the kitchen, vaguely thinking that if she can’t be social, at least she can be helpful. This proves to be a mistake—she accidentally walks in on Joyce kneeling on the floor with a half dozen of Will’s old drawings fanned out around her, tear tracks drying on her cheeks.

“Oh—shoot. I’m sorry, I’m intruding, I’ll just—”

“No, no, it’s fine. Come sit, maybe you can help me,” Joyce chuckles damply, wiping at her eyes with one hand and patting the floor next to her with the other. “Will’s been such a pain while we’ve been packing, trying to seem all grown up. He’s made me promise to only keep his _best_ art and toss the rest. And I…” She trails off; shakes her head wistfully. “Well, as you can imagine, I’m having a little bit of trouble deciding what I’m allowed to bring. How are you as an art critic?”

“An amateur—but a big fan of Will’s work in general,” Robin says, taking the offered seat on the linoleum. She can certainly see Joyce’s dilemma: even taking out the sentimental value factor, Will’s _good._ How do you throw away something like that? “Might I recommend something from his Blue Period?” she suggests, grabbing one of the drawings at random—some sort of wizard battle in cobalt and cyan. Joyce laughs.

“Oh, good choice. I definitely can’t leave behind Will the Wise,” she agrees. It’s impossible to miss the pain and regret in her voice; the longing.

Robin, realizing this is about much more than Will’s art, takes a chance: “Hey. They’re gonna be okay, you know? They’ve got you, and each other. And they deserve a chance to live in a town that’s not actively trying to murder them. That will be a fun change of pace.”

“I know, I know. But just… their friends are here. Their _lives_ are here. I know I’m doing the right thing—deep down, I know it—but. I look out at that party, and at how much fun they’re having, and…” Joyce wipes at her eyes again. “It’s just so hard to think I’m not making a mistake.”

In the other room, the boys erupt with laughter. Dustin crows, “I can’t believe you said that!”

Robin picks at the floor tile.

“My grandmother’s never been back to France,” she blurts. Realizing that’s a total non sequitur without context, she backs up: “She was born there, and lived there during the war. She… her parents, they got put on the trains, and she married the first guy she saw and converted to get that star off her chest.”

“Your grandfather?”

Robin shakes her head. “The guy my grandfather saved her from. They told me the romantic version, but looking back… they barely got out of there alive. She’s still—she’s _so_ French. The way she cooks, the way she talks. She made my Dad learn the language, and me, but… she’s never going back there again. Not ever. And I guess… sometimes a place hurts you badly enough it just can’t be home anymore. No matter how much you love it.”

_I can’t stay in Hawkins anymore—it’s killing me._

Joyce puts her hand down over Robin’s, and gives her a shaky smile. “She sounds like an amazing woman.”

Robin flips her hand and squeezes Joyce’s fingers. “She is.”

In the next room, the track changes to “American Girl” and suddenly Steve’s whooping “Nance, get up! Come on, you love this song!”

“I’d better—” Robin mumbles, climbing to her feet and checking to make sure Steve’s not about to get himself punched.

It turns out she needn’t have bothered. She gets to the door frame in time to see Steve drag Nancy onto her feet and pull her into what Robin can only describe as a loose, inaccurate lindy hop. Will and Dustin, inspired, get up and start head-banging, and it’s not long before Max holds her hand out to Lucas. When he shakes his head— _no way, I’m too cool for dancing—_ Steve seamlessly breaks his hold with Nancy and spins a giggling Max around the room; Nancy pulls on a shit-eating grin and forces Mike to dance with her, ruthlessly manhandling her taller younger brother. By the end of the first chorus, the whole lot of them are jumping up and down like they’re in a mosh pit, Steve leading the charge and lip-synching at a reluctantly-smiling El.

Jonathan stays stubbornly on the couch, avoiding this nonsense. When Robin decides he has the right idea and joins him, he shakes his head and rolls his eyes. “I can’t believe I’m gonna miss that guy,” he says, jerking his chin in Steve’s direction. Robin isn’t sure if he’s talking to her or himself.

Still, she shrugs. “Yeah, well. The dingus grows on you.”

“Like ivy,” he murmurs.

Robin was gonna say _like mold,_ which she thinks says a lot about Jonathan than it does about her, honestly.

_God it's so painful—when something that's so close is still so far out of reach…_

She’s been so caught up in observing the small drama of Will and El leaving their circle of friends that it only now fully hits her: no more Byers family means no more Jonathan, either. No familiar face popping up at games and recitals to take pictures for the school paper; no good music pouring from shitty speakers as he pulls up in his LTD every morning. She’s been in the same classes as Jonathan for as long as she can remember—the quiet kid in the back, keeping to himself, long cuffs around thin wrists and a sack lunch that never seemed quite full enough.

“Jonathan…” she says, testing the syllables of his name and finding them strangely unfamiliar on her tongue. Has she really talked to him so little? “Why weren’t we ever friends?”

He laughs, unexpectedly loud and bright. She’s never done that before—made Jonathan Byers laugh—and she feels suddenly and immensely proud of herself. “Don’t take it personally; it’s not your fault. I, uh. I don’t really… _do…_ friends. I’m not all that good at it.”

“Tell me about it,” she jokes, because she can certainly relate. “But seriously. I feel like I should have… we could have…” She doesn’t know what she wants to say.

Luckily, Jonathan seems to understand her anyway. “Yeah, maybe,” he shrugs. “I, uh. I thought you were really good in _You Can’t Take It With You,_ you know. That ballet dancing. I laughed like crazy.”

Robin’s jaw drops, because that was years ago, now; she can’t believe she made that much of an impression. And—hey. Apparently it’s _not_ her first time making Jonathan laugh.

Before she can figure out how to respond to that, the song ends and everyone falls into a dizzy, breathless pile on the floor. “Manhunt?” Dustin suggests, and the kids cheer and scramble out the door and into the woods. How they aren’t terrified of the darkness between those trees after everything they’ve seen, Robin will never know.

But in the sudden quiet of the tape ending and the kids leaving, it’s abundantly obvious and bordering on awkward that the only people left are her, Steve, Jonathan and Nancy.

For a horrifying moment, they all just stare at each other.

“I think I’m contractually obligated to suggest Truth or Dare,” Nancy says wryly. “It’s in the book of teenage bylaws.”

“Section seven, paragraph five,” Robin agrees too-quickly, wincing at her own eagerness for a social contract. No one else seems to notice, though, and they circle up with their plastic cups of pop, splayed out on the floor in their sock feet.

It starts pretty pedestrian—Robin gets Jonathan to admit he thinks Mrs. Robertson, the art sub, is the hottest teacher in school; Jonathan dares Nancy to eat the boys’ leftover pizza crusts. And then Nancy turns to Steve, and asks, and he gives her such a purposefully casual look when he says “Truth” that Robin has to fight the urge to hold her breath.

“What’s going on between you and Robin?” Nancy asks it lightly, like she’s just teasing, but there’s a steeliness behind the question that makes Robin’s teeth hurt.

“Nothing. We’re just friends.”

Nancy whips around to look at Robin for confirmation; Robin shrugs. “Not my question, but yeah. I have no interest in…” she waves her hand in Steve’s general direction, “…any of that.”

“Well thanks very much,” Steve snarks. “But it’s my turn to ask you—Truth or Dare?”

“Truth.”

He opens his mouth, then closes it again. Frowns. “I—I dunno. I feel like I already know everything. Shit. Now I can’t think of anything good. Somebody else ask.”

Jonathan chimes in, voice wistful. “If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go?” he asks.

He’s clearly preoccupied with the move, but the words are out of her mouth before she can think about them: “San Francisco.”

“Really?” Steve asks, eyebrows going up. “Huh. Woulda thought you’d say France or something.”

“I thought you already knew everything,” Robin mocks on autopilot, but inside, she can feel her chest constricting.

Steve doesn’t know about Ian. No one’s ever known about Ian. And that’s never bothered her before—it’s been far, far safer that way, to be sure—but she finds it throws her off her equilibrium this time. Somehow, she’s not used to Steve not knowing things about her anymore; when he’d said _I feel like I already know everything,_ her instinctive internal response had been _probably, yeah._

“What’s in San Francisco?” Nancy asks, and Robin’s brought up short because—what _is_ in San Francisco, at this point? Other than borrowed memories?

“Alcatraz,” she manages to spit out in a reasonable amount of time. “Spent so long in Hawkins, might as well tour the other famous prisons of the world.”

“And then you can see the Bastille,” Steve suggests, stuck on this. “See? France.”

“The Bastille doesn’t exist anymore. They literally tore it down, that was the whole point. How do you not know this?”

“You were there; you know I failed Mrs. Click’s class.”

“That was _U.S_. history! Oh my god, let’s just—move on. Nancy. Truth or Dare?”

“Truth.”

“What’s… the most embarrassing thing Mike’s walked in on you doing?”

Nancy makes an amused, scandalized little noise at having been asked, and the game continues.

They play for nearly an hour, until Steve gets a strange look on his face and notes they haven’t heard from the kids in a while. Watching the same shiver of worry pass over everyone in the room is eerie as all get-out, and Robin doesn’t hesitate to jump up with them as they grab some flashlights—it says a lot about the Byers family, she thinks, that they knew to pack the flashlights last—and head out into the woods, shouting the kids’ names.

Luckily, they don’t have to go very far before they’re rewarded with some contrite cursing and scattered _we’re over here_ s. Robin follows as Jonathan leads them to where the party is gathered around a mostly-deconstructed fort—pretty much a pile of timber, at this point. A slab of wood on the ground reads _Castle Byers._

“What are you doing?!” Jonathan yelps, and the kids all talk over each other as they explain: the castle got all messed up before the Fourth of July, and at first they were going to fix it, and then they thought maybe Will should take it with him to reconstruct at the new house, and _then_ Will decided that he didn’t want to build it again anywhere else, and each of them should take a piece of it home as a keepsake.

“I’m sorry, I should have asked you first—we made it together,” Will mumbles, clearly worried Jonathan will be mad.

Jonathan just laughs a sad, wet little laugh and wraps his brother in a shaky hug. “No, don’t worry about it. It’s a good idea. But save a piece for me, huh?”

There’s not a dry eye in the house. Without saying a word, Steve reaches out to pull Robin under his arm and against his side. Robin lets herself be pulled, and rests her head on his shoulder.

(When he drives her home that night, they leave with a bundle of Castle Byers sticks in his trunk— _a faggot,_ she thinks to herself, and wonders if one day she’ll find it funny.

On top of it is a sign that says _All Friends Welcome.)_

* * *

The following weekend—after the goodbyes, after all of it—Dustin suggests they have a Scoops Troop reunion to teach Erica the rules of Dungeons and Dragons.

Ever the responsible babysitter, Steve asks the other munchkins if they want to play, too. Immediately, Erica and Lucas throw a synchronized tantrum, announcing “I’m not playing with _her”_ /“I’m not playing with _him”_ in horrified unison.

Mike throws in a withering stare for good measure. “No thanks. We already have a party.”

“Dustin’s playing with us, and he’s in your party.”

“He’s DMing for you as an act of charity. That’s totally different.”

“Max?” Steve asks, ignoring Lucas and Mike’s glares.

She scoffs. “Please. I play _real_ games.”

“You play video games. Football is a real game.”

“I could kick your ass in football, too.”

Steve opens his mouth to argue, then closes it again. “That’s—probably true.”

“You were a varsity basketball player,” Robin notes, cracking up. “Why the fuck did you say football?”

“I’m just trying to be inclusive! When did this turn into ‘make fun of Steve’ time?”

The kids all share a look. Erica’s the one to crack first. “Are you really gonna make me say it?”

“Fine, yes, ha ha, every time is make fun of Steve time.”

“I told you they’d reject you,” Dustin says with a shrug. “This is a Scoops Troop mission.”

So they pile into Erica’s pink, frilly bedroom and break out the pencils and paper. Steve decides immediately to be a fighter (“Like Conan the Barbarian, man!”); Erica insists on being a thief, so Dustin has to teach her like a million additional details about extra dice and percentage tables for her special abilities.

“This book is garbage,” Robin announces as she skims through the play-by-play adventure that explains the rules. “No matter how you roll the nice lady cleric who saved you dies? That’s so sexist.”

“Say what?” Erica yelps.

“It’s just an example,” Dustin soothes. “I don’t do that stuff when I DM. Promise. Have you figured out what you want to be yet?”

She flips back listlessly to the section about character types.

“Can’t I just be, like, the ye olde town troubadour or something?” she asks. With school starting soon, she really should start practicing clarinet again. She’s totally let it slide all summer.

Dustin lights up. “Oh, you want to be a bard! That’s what I play. It’s kind of complicated, though, and you can’t start out as a bard; you have to work your way up to it.”

“Doesn’t any musician? It’s like Carnegie Hall.”

Dustin blinks at her. “…Huh?”

“Y’know, the old joke? ‘How do you get to Carnegie Hall?’ ‘Practice, practice, practice?’”

She’s rewarded by three blank looks.

“I swear to god, the esoteric references you get and the ones you don’t get is a harder code to crack than any Russian conspiracy.”

Dustin shakes off her ribbing and points at her character sheet. “My point is, if you want to be a bard you have to earn… well, way more experience points than we’re probably ever gonna get to with the campaign I planned, and you’d also have to start as a fighter when Steve’s already a fighter.”

Steve frowns at that. “Wait, so no one else in Middle World—”

 _“Middle Earth!”_ Dustin corrects sharply, “And that’s not even—”

Steve waves him off. “—can play music but like super fancy people? That doesn’t seem right.”

“Not all musicians, just bards, it’s a specific thing—”

“So why can’t Robin be a—” Steve looks down at the book again, “Magic-user or whatever, who also happens to play music on the side? Like a night gig?”

So Robin plays as Lady Grover, a magic-user who sings when she casts spells because she’s also practicing for her night gig on the side. She uses her Tammy Thompson Muppet voice almost exclusively, and fights a horde of the undead with her friends, and laughs so hard in the process that Lucas barges in demanding to know what’s so funny… which only sets her off even more.

“If you feel left out, you can always join us,” Dustin sing-songs, waggling his eyebrows invitingly, and Lucas throws up his hands in frustration.

“I don’t feel left out, I just—ugh!” he grumbles, slamming Erica’s door behind him as he leaves.

“Someone didn’t make his jealousy saving throw,” Erica tuts with a shake of her head, and they burst into giggles all over again.

* * *

Robin wakes early on the first day of school, nostalgic and unsettled. She’s been counting down the days until she could leave Hawkins her entire life—and now, she’s finally a senior. Just two semesters left, and she’s out of here.

Figures, it would finally produce a few reasons to care that she’s not staying in the eleventh hour.

She’s finishing up her cereal when the dulcet tones of The Beach Boys waft in through the kitchen window: _Sitting in my car outside your house…_

She peeks outside and finds that, true to the lyrics, Steve’s Beamer is idling in her driveway, sound up and windows down. Laughing, she grabs her backpack and locks up behind her, bike helmet forgotten.

“And what’s this?” she asks, coming around the side and throwing herself into the passenger seat.

“A one-time treat,” Steve insists, waving his finger at her like a schoolmarm. “Don’t get used to it.”

“Sure, sure.”

She makes teasing small talk as he wends his way across town, purposefully trying to drown out the sound of the too-sharp fife interlude that’s made her always hate this song. Still, on a day like today, she finds it growing on her. _Every now and then we hear our song; we’ve been having fun all summer long._

It’s only when Steve makes a left on Fair Lawn and not right that she realizes they’re not headed to school. In fact, she knows exactly where they’re going.

“Steve,” she says, trying to keep the laughter out of her voice and maintain a judgmental tone, “why are we heading to Dustin’s house?”

The tips of Steve’s ears turn red. “Listen. Do you have any idea how much shit Henderson gave me when I told him he’d have to ride his bike today even though Nancy’s giving a ride to Mike and Lucas? You’d think I’d killed his fucking cat.”

“So… he pouted and you just caved, immediately.”

“I didn’t _cave,_ I just…” Steve stares straight ahead and tries to sound nonchalant. “He pointed out that it’s his _first_ first day of high school, and your last first day of high school, and it would be nice to do something to commemorate that. And then I agreed.”

“You’re such a softie,” Robin laughs—her mockery turning into a full on giggle fit when they turn on Dustin’s street and she sees Max sitting on his front steps, skateboard over her knees. “Oh my god!”

“Well I wasn’t going to leave Max out if everyone else was getting a ride!” Steve argues, shrill, and she puts a placating hand on his shoulder.

“I know, I know. It’s just cute, that’s all.”

“Whatever,” Steve grumbles, and then Dustin and Max are piling into the car, already arguing about some science project or something, and there isn’t any more opportunity to talk.

* * *

It’s incredible how much _louder_ school seems with the munchkins around. But somehow, despite all the oxygen they take up and how invested Robin is in making sure no upperclassmen give them shit, it’s Nancy she finds herself periodically checking on as the day progresses. Something about the set of her shoulders and the turn of her frown sets off alarm bells in Robin’s head, but she’s hard pressed to figure out why.

It takes until fourth period for her to place why she finds the lost, forlorn expression Nancy’s walking around with so remarkable: it’s the first time in as long as Robin can remember that she’s seen Nancy at school alone. As far back as Robin can recall, Nancy’s always been a part of a pair—with Barb, or with Steve, or with Jonathan. She’s never quite been a part of the popular set, but she’s never been on her own, either. She’s always had someone to walk through the halls with.

Robin has a lot of experience with feeling alone in a crowd.

She decides to track down Nancy during lunch, only to waste most of the period looking for her. She’s not in the cafeteria, or the parking lot, or the library. She’s not at her locker, or in any of the girls’ bathrooms. It’s only because it’s on the way to the nurse’s office that Robin thinks to check the dark room—and sure enough, she finds Nancy sitting on the floor in the low red light, knees drawn up to her chest.

“There you are, Wheeler. You okay?” she asks, stepping in and closing the door behind her. She’s still not… friends, with Nancy, not exactly, but she knows the rule by now: if a party member needs assistance, duty requires that you provide that assistance.

Nancy wipes hastily at her eyes, fixing her maddeningly still-perfect makeup. “Oh, Robin. Hi.” She makes to get up, but Robin waves her off and slides down the wall to join her on the concrete. “I didn’t realize you were looking for me. Can I help you with something?”

Steve talks about Nancy like she’s so hard to read, but Robin finds her affect almost embarrassingly obvious. The way she tries to get the upper hand in the conversation by making it about Robin and not her; how she carefully downplays her vulnerabilities so as to try to make them invisible.

“No, just.” Robin gestures to the room around them; to Nancy’s presence in it. “First day of school, and no Jonathan. It can’t be fun.”

“It’s not my preference, no,” Nancy mumbles in agreement. She looks around the room, gaze landing everywhere but on Robin. “We had all these plans. Organized takeover of the school paper, using our experience at the _Post_ for leverage. Coordinated schedules so we had the same free period. I made this whole color-coded calendar for college applications so we could have our recommendations written and everything done by the early decision deadline. NYU for him, Columbia for me. And I know some of that stuff can still happen—I can still make the play for Editor in Chief, we can still go to New York, but…”

“…You weren’t supposed to have to do it alone,” Robin supplies, when Nancy trails off. Nancy nods. “Yeah, that sucks. Just because you might only be long distance for a year doesn’t mean it doesn’t also suck.”

Nancy makes a short, clipped sound that would be a snort if her manners allowed it. “Right.”

Robin picks at her cuticles, and considers what it is she wants to say. “You know,” she starts, thinking things through. “Steve did say that if I needed help with college stuff, you’d be the one to talk to. I may not be as fun to look at as Jonathan, but... I’m good at following calendars, color-coordinated or not. We could maybe work on applications together? If you want?”

Nancy’s face doesn’t soften so much as lose the protective, laser-focused sharpness she wears like armor. It’s enough to make Robin’s breath hitch in her throat—Nancy is deeply, unfairly pretty, even if she isn’t Robin’s type. It’s a lot to take in, sitting this close.

“I’d like that,” Nancy says, hardly more than a whisper.

They sit together in the dark room, not speaking, until the bell rings. It’s only when Robin stands up that Nancy’s hand shoots out, catching her by the wrist. The feeling of the slightly raised, rough scar that bisects Nancy’s palm encircling her arm—or maybe the knowledge that Jonathan has a scar identical to it—makes Robin shiver.

“I’m not used to…” Nancy starts, then frowns and tries again. “Um. People don’t… check on me. And that’s because I’ve made it that way; I got so sick of being treated as helpless I did whatever I had to do to make sure they cut it out. I’m not sorry about that. But I think I maybe got too good at it, and I…”

Nancy looks so deeply uncomfortable with having to say any of this out loud Robin tries to give her a hand: “You’re welcome.”

Nancy’s laugh is genuine this time. “You didn’t even let me say thank you.”

Robin shrugs. “Wasn’t sure you’d make it there without help.”

“Exactly,” Nancy says, letting Robin pull her to her feet. “That’s my point.”

* * *

**_(November, 1985)_ **

“Not anyone,” Steve says, and it’s all Robin can do to echo him:

“Oh.”

The high from the weed Steve bought off Nicole Reilly doesn’t have quite the same kick as Soviet truth serum, but it seems to work about as well as he tentatively explains the way he feels about Jonathan Byers. And Nancy Wheeler, still, after all this time. And Jonathan-and-Nancy, an entirely different entity than either one or the other of them, about which he has equally-strong, equally-complicated feelings.

And what surprises Robin most is that none of it is a surprise to her; not really. She’s seen the evidence with her own two eyes, hasn’t she? _Like ivy. Truth or Dare._ The Henley of Jonathan’s that Joyce loaned Steve at the hospital still draped over the desk chair in Steve’s bedroom, unreturned. The Christmas-gift camera Jonathan took with him everywhere. The way Nancy always asks after Steve during her study sessions with Robin, but gets flustered and prickly when Robin suggests Nancy just call him herself.

Or the fact that Robin told her most terrifying secret to the most popular kid in town on the floor of a movie theater bathroom, and he folded it into his worldview like it was nothing, like it didn’t change a thing between them.

“Why didn’t you say anything before?”

“I dunno. Didn’t want to make it be about me when it was your thing,” he says, like she has the market cornered on queerness in Hawkins. He shrugs, a little sadly. “Didn’t want it to be true, maybe.”

“Hey,” she protests, pushing at his foot with her own. “It’s like you said. This goes in the good column. Right?”

“Yeah? How? It’s never gonna happen. And even in a world where it might, they’d never want me. Nobody wants me. You didn’t even want to _fake_ date me.”

“That’s different,” she protests, but he’s on a tear now.

“I’m a fucking has-been.”

She kicks him again. “You’re nineteen, dingus.”

“Exactly! Nineteen and going nowhere. God. My dad’s right. I’m just—I’m just taking up space, I’m not _doing_ anything. We make shit money at the video store, and I’m not qualified for anything else. What am I gonna do, reapply to colleges so they can reject me all over again? I’m not getting any smarter, Rob. I mean, fuck. Best I can hope for is to be the guy that gives the shitbirds a ride on their way to save the world again or whatever. What kind of a life is that?”

She waits a few seconds to make sure he’s really done before she softly ventures an answer: “A pretty important one, if you’re a shitbird in need of a ride.”

“Right,” he scoffs, laying back down and staring at the ceiling. She scooches over to settle in next to him, curling into his side so her head lays on top of his shoulder.

“I probably would have killed myself if I hadn’t met you this summer,” she admits in a whisper, completely by accident. Less because she hadn’t meant to say it and more because she’d had no idea it was true until the moment the words leave her mouth. But of course that’s what it had been. She just hadn’t recognized the carved-out, caved-in feeling for what it was because she’d never been out from under it before. Not until now.

“Don’t say shit like that,” he snaps, but she recognizes the frisson of tension in his voice as the fear it is, and not anger.

“It’s true. ‘One big error,’ remember? I was just… so done with it. All of it. And then—I had somewhere to go every day. And someone who actually laughed at my jokes, even when they were mean. Actually, especially then. Someone who got Dylan off my back when it felt like the whole town would never let me live down my shitty mistakes. Someone who had no expectations of me whatsoever, so I could just—be myself.”

He cranes his neck to peer down at her, astounded. “We weren’t even friends then.”

She smiles at him and shrugs. “What can I say? You saved my life, sugar bear.”

“Oh, right,” he mutters, slipping out from under her and crawling over to the turntable to flip the LP. He drops the needle, and “Funeral For A Friend/Love Lies Bleeding” comes through the speakers.

She tilts her head so that she’s staring at his sock feet upside down from her spot on the floor. “No, you’re supposed to switch it. The other record’s in the sleeve.”

“I like this one,” he says, and returns to his spot by her side.

For long minutes, they just listen to the music and breathe.

“Nancy and Jonathan are missing out, you know,” she eventually says, the words nearly lost amidst the clamorous guitar and synth.

Steve seems to have no trouble hearing her, though, if his sharp inhale is anything to go by. And then—to her surprise and delight—

He makes a joke.

“You know, you’d think my whole situation would make it _twice_ as easy to move on, but…”

Robin bursts into laughter. “Soon, my friend. One day.”

“Sure.”

They lapse into silence once more. Elton plays on without them, oblivious to the significance of the moment. Or—then again, maybe not:

_Everything about this house was born to grow and die…_

“Do your parents know?” Steve asks, and even as she denies it there’s an familiar thrill that goes up her back, even after all this time, at not having to say _know what?_

“What? No. Of course not.”

“Why not?”

The words stop in her throat. Four languages at her disposal, and she doesn’t know how to explain it to him. How she had a window and she missed it. How Ian was invited to Thanksgiving; how it hadn’t been a deal breaker, once. If she’d known then, if she could have said something…

But that was before. Before it was a thing that killed you.

She can never tell them now.

Steve misinterprets her silence, eyes going soft and sympathetic. “Shit. It’s like that for you, too, huh?”

But it’s not like that. It’s not like they’d kick her out or disown her or anything. Or at least—she doesn’t think they would, probably. But they’d never look at her the same. She’d be a dead woman walking, in their eyes. A ghost.

 _(Zombie Boy._ This town has no tolerance for it—the audacity of life to persist beyond ruin. It’s why Ian left, and the rot still got to him anyway.)

She can’t explain any of that to Steve. Not easily, anyway. But if there’s one thing Steve’s good at, it’s getting her to admit to things she’s never said aloud.

“My uncle died of AIDS,” she says. “A few years ago.”

Steve gapes. “You’re shitting me.”

“Wish I were.”

_“Here?”_

She shakes her head. “Out west. San Francisco.”

The unbearably kind look on his face comes back—remembering what she said at the Byers’ place, no doubt. “Robin—”

“So if I tell them—” she barrels on, only to realize she has no clue how that sentence is supposed to end. She takes a shaky breath and tries again. “If I tell them…”

Nope.

Steve’s arms wrap around her in a cautious hug. “I’m sorry, Rob. God. I’m so sorry that happened.”

They lay there together as the track changes, Robin burying her face in Steve’s neck as “Candle in the Wind” washes over them. She’d scoff at the irony if she thought she could do it without sobbing.

_I would’ve liked to have known you, but I was just a kid. Your candle burned out long before your legend ever did._

“Do me a favor and don’t die on me, okay?” she rasps, alarmed to hear tears welling up in her voice, blocking her throat. “None of the munchkins, either.”

Steve’s jaw works as he tries to decide what to say. Eventually, he gives up on it, crushing her into his chest instead. “Didn’t you hear me, before?” he asks, rocking her in his arms. “I’m not going anywhere.”

* * *

The next morning, Robin wakes up to the visual assault of Steve’s checkered wallpaper and a stale taste in her mouth. It comes back to her in pieces—how Steve had rolled another joint to get them both to stop crying, and eventually the two of them had stumbled up the stairs to his bedroom in the wee hours of the morning.

Belatedly, she recognizes the sound that woke her up: the muffled reverberation of Steve singing in the shower. It’s clear he can’t remember any of the words to “Benny and the Jets,” because he’s just screeching _BENNY!_ in increasingly off-key silly voices, his piercing warble traveling easily through the walls.

Robin smiles, rolls over, and goes back to sleep.

* * *

**_(April, 1986)_ **

When Robin exits the school bus into the parking lot of a Best Western in South Bend, her satisfied sigh comes a lot more from a chance to stretch her legs and finally get a little distance from Tommy C. than it does the fact that they’ve made it to their destination. This is the first time in years Hawkins HS has had a band decent enough to place in the Great Lakes Orchestra Festival—and though she knows it will look good on her resume, it’s hard to care about that when she’s due to hear back from schools starting next week. It’s too late to be impressive now; she’s either got it, or she doesn’t.

Still. It would be nice to win.

Once Mr. Sherman has them all checked in—the thrill of sharing a bed with a girl somewhat muted by the fact that they’re stuffed six to a room to save money and every single roommate Robin’s stuck with is deeply annoying, has a boyfriend, or both—they haul back on the bus to go to the civic auditorium. The competition doesn’t start until tomorrow, but there’s a reception tonight, and an assembly. It all sounds extremely boring, but there’s a lot Robin’s willing to endure for free cookies. The place is packed by the time they arrive, teeming with students from all over the Midwest. She looks around curiously, as though she could somehow size up their talent just by the look of them.

_“Robin Buckley?”_

She knows that voice. She’s got perfect pitch; she couldn’t forget that voice if she wanted to. Robin turns in the crowd, trying to find the source, but there’s people everywhere. Did she imagine it?

“Robin, oh my god—!”

 _Wham._ Robin turns just in time to get two armfuls of enthusiastic clarinetist, suddenly wrapped in an overwhelming tackle hug. She staggers backwards with their momentum, returning the embrace on instinct and tucking her face into familiar blonde curls. “Hey, Caroline,” she gasps, the air too knocked out of her to get any louder than that.

Firm hands grasp her upper arms, and beautiful, impossible Caroline McConnell leans back to get a good look at her. “I can’t believe it’s you! What are you _doing_ here? I mean, sorry, stupid question, I know exactly what you’re doing here. It’s so good to see you!”

“You, too,” Robin breathes, though _good_ isn’t exactly the first word she’d pick for the way her lungs have gone all fluttery and her heart is absolutely jackhammering in her chest. She might pass out. Would Caroline give her mouth to mouth if she passed out? Her mind feels completely blank; she says the first thing that she thinks of: “I can’t believe you remember me.”

Caroline’s honey brown eyes go soft and chiding. “You’re joking, right?”

“It’s been three years,” Robin mumbles, as if she hasn’t thought about her last night at Camp Hiawatha at least once a month since it happened.

“Yeah, and you’re kind of unforgettable,” Caroline counters with a grin. Her cheeks crater with dimples, and Robin finds her courage.

“Do you want to get out of here?”

“What, like ditch the competition?”

“Just tonight. It’s all speeches and bullshit, right?”

Caroline looks around, checking to see if she’s lost her chaperone. Robin doesn’t bother; Mr. Sherman will be so busy keeping the rowdy junior boys in line there’s no way he’ll notice she’s gone. Satisfied, Caroline turns back to her. “I’m pretty sure we passed a Scoops Ahoy down the street. Wanna get some ice cream?”

It feels like a sign. Robin could walk on air.

“I would love some ice cream.”

* * *

Twenty minutes later, they’re pressed thigh-to-thigh in a booth over a USS Butterscotch.

“No _way_ you worked here,” Caroline’s laughing, tapping at Robin’s elbow in disbelief. She won’t stop _touching_ her. “In one of those little uniforms? I want proof. I want pictures.”

“You’re just going to have to believe me,” Robin shrugs, though in hindsight she actually finds herself a little sad she and Steve never snapped a Polaroid together in their sailor outfits before it all went sideways. She hates the memories a lot less than she thought she would.

“What else have I missed? Catch me up. Those genius ears of yours save any lives lately?”

The words are out of Robin’s mouth before she can fully consider them: “Oh, yeah. Last summer when I worked at Scoops, even. I intercepted a secret Russian code and was able to crack it in time to stop a full-on Soviet invasion.”

Caroline nods sagely, like this is a normal thing to say. “Installing nukes?”

“Opening a portal to another dimension under the mall, actually.”

“Typical.”

“What about you? Any reality-shattering life developments I should know about?”

Caroline’s smile goes furtive as her cheeks turn red. “I got a girlfriend.”

“What?” Robin’s insides squeeze like someone’s trying to make a balloon animal with her guts; her stomach flips. Though, not gonna lie, she’d definitely been harboring fantasies of sloppy makeouts in the janitor’s closet in the auditorium, somehow—despite her desire—the idea of Caroline going steady with some girl fills her with an even greater incandescent joy. Caroline’s from a small town outside Muncie; if she could find a girl to date _there,_ then…

Then it’s possible. Anything could be possible.

Caroline opens a hinge in the necklace she’s wearing; Robin hadn’t realized it was a locket. “Her name’s Tiffany,” she says proudly, showing off the tiny picture of the two of them crammed in a photo booth, Caroline’s lips kissing Tiffany’s cheek.

“She’s gorgeous.”

“I know, right? And the best part is, sleepovers with your best friend means no pesky open door policy.”

Robin laughs. “I would’ve thought the best part is that it’s only a few more months until college.”

Caroline’s smile falters. “Fingers crossed. She’s still waiting to hear back from a few places. What about you? Big college plans?”

Robin rattles off the list of applications easily now: Oberlin, Purdue, Wesleyan. IU Bloomington as a safety, because it’s where her parents went and the in-state tuition is good. And her first choice, the one that keeps her up at night—UC Berkeley.

Caroline bats at her arm again. “No way! Robin. I got in early to Stanford. That’s where I’m going. If you get into Berkeley, we’ll be neighbors.”

Robin could easily point out that with Bay Area traffic, they wouldn’t be that much closer together in California than their hometowns here in Indiana are. She could point out that they never exchanged contact information last time, and there’s no reason to expect they’d stay in touch now. But she doesn’t, because somehow, it doesn’t feel like that. Suddenly, the future feels expansive, and imminent, and filled to the brim with possibility. So close and so _feasible_ that Robin could reach out and hold it in her hands. She’s been so, so careful not to invest too much in her dreams of the West Coast. She’s applied to schools close to home. She’s made her peace with what it would look like to go to any of them.

But Caroline’s got a girlfriend, right here in Indiana. Caroline’s going to college in California, like it’s a thing girls like them get to do. And if it’s possible for her, then…

Hawkins HS comes in fourth at the orchestra competition, just good enough to return home empty-handed. But Robin gets back on the bus with a phone number in her pocket, and winnings far more precious than a band trophy.

* * *

“Cut the wheel! Cut, cut, cut!”

“I’m _cutting!_ This is me cutting!”

So. Driving lessons with Steve are going… fine.

Robin really hadn’t had any intention of learning to drive. But then a few months ago, one by one the rugrats had started bragging about it—how their parents were taking them to practice on nights and weekends. Only, well. That’s not the kind of relationship Max has at home, and as the resident zoomer she’d felt the imbalance pretty acutely. Steve, recognizing a future getaway driver when he saw one, offered to step in and teach Max, and Robin had decided to come along for moral support. Somehow that turned into Steve teasing her into getting behind the wheel herself, and now, months later, it’s really only parallel parking that she’s still struggling with.

Max, it should be stated, is a preternaturally gifted parallel parker, which is why Robin almost loses her shit when Steve says, for the tenth time, “It’s really not that hard! Even Max can do it!”

“There’s no _even Max_ anything,” Robin grumbles through gritted teeth as she pulls forward out of the space and tries again. “They literally call her Mad Max. Do you hear anyone calling me Mad Robin?”

“I mean, I’d say you’re a pretty mad Robin right now,” Steve mutters, and she punches him in the shoulder. “Ow! Jesus. Just—sorry, fine. Try it again.”

So Robin tries it again, and cuts the wheel, and tries it again, and cuts the wheel. Unlike her dad, who’d felt the need to fill every silence in the car with constant advice, Steve sits quietly and lets her fail at her own pace, which is annoyingly helpful.

Eventually, she gets it. And then gets it a second time, to prove it wasn’t a fluke, and a third, just to show off. And then Steve’s pushing her out of the car to hug her, and gives her a weird, complicated bow he definitely learned off Dustin. “The student has become the master. I have nothing more to teach you.”

 _Well that’s not true,_ Robin thinks to herself, before making fun of him anyway.

* * *

Even though it’s been almost a year since Starcourt Mall, Robin still gets nightmares.

Sometimes they’re full of eldritch horrors—slimy tentacles and teeth, the skittering of too many limbs, the unearthly roar of a creature that wants her dead. Monsters in the shadows. Sometimes they’re full of men in uniform asking questions with no answers, spitting insults in a language not even Robin can understand. Men who take what they want regardless of what you can give, and take it in blood. And sometimes… sometimes it’s Steve coming into work emaciated, his face covered in black and blue, only for her to realize the bruises aren’t the evidence of yet another fight he got into protecting the kids, but Kaposi’s Sarcoma lesions. Purple spots blooming like roses across his skin, sapping his strength.

The problem with the nightmares is that any single one of them could come true tomorrow, and she’s got no way to stop it.

Because monsters are real, and they live under her town. Because the world could end any minute, two world powers engaged in a high-stakes game of chicken. Because there’s a plague out there that kills people like her. Her, and Steve, and sweet Will Byers. No abomination from the Upside Down, no communist threat—just a virus. Something so small it can’t even be seen; so small no one even knows what it really is. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

But the world is changing. A small step, a giant leap. Last year, Rock Hudson died, and President Reagan said “AIDS” out loud for the first time. Last week, the Circuit Court ruled that Ryan White was allowed to go back to school, making news all over Indiana.

And yesterday…

Yesterday, Robin got her acceptance letter to UC Berkeley, and all the plans she’s resisted making started raveling out in her head, tempting and tangible. How easy it will be to make day trips down to San Francisco—just a few miles down I-80 and the Castro is hers to explore, in whatever jalopy she can afford to buy after graduation. She can volunteer at hospitals and food banks; she can go to protests and bars to her heart’s content. She can bring Caroline with her, even, so she doesn’t have to go alone.

(Last night, she’d asked Steve to come with her. And he’d given her the fondest, most heartbreaking look, and said _you know I’m never leaving these kids._ Which she does know, of course, but that means it’s only a matter of time until she gets her way—the munchkins are too brilliant not to go to college themselves, and then Hawkins won’t have any more appeal. She can wait that long. And in the meantime, she’d said, handing her globe to Steve with her pinky on Hawkins and her thumb on Berkley, she’s still accessible _._ Only a phone call away.

When she leaves, she knows, she’ll take her _Claudine_ books and her globe with her. But she’ll leave behind the postcard, tucked into the fold of the Beamer’s passenger seat. A promise, delayed but not forgotten: _One day you’ll be out with me in sunny San Francisco.)_

But all of that’s in the future. Today is a big day all on its own.

Today is the day she sent in her deposit, officially accepting a spot in the University of California Berkeley’s Class of 1990. Today is the three year anniversary of the day Ian Kincaid died in hospice, across a bridge and a world away from Berkeley’s main campus. Today, “Kiss” by Prince and the Revolution hit number one on Casey Kasem’s Top 40 countdown, and Robin sang along as she practiced parallel parking in the Beamer all by herself: _women, not girls, rule my world, I said they rule my world._

So today, Robin’s finally facing one of her nightmares, and putting it to bed forever:

“Mom, Dad? I have something I need to tell you. Can we talk?”

No matter what happens next, Robin’s bags are already packed. She hopes she won’t need them; hopes her parents will find it in themselves to actually hear her when she talks and understand her. She’s got a few different languages she can try to reach them in, after all. But if she needs the bags tonight, then… that’s okay. On top of her luggage is a walkie talkie, and the people who will believe her no matter what happens are only a code red away.

It’s like old Casey’s always said—she’s got her feet on the ground.

But she’s reaching for the stars, too.

**Author's Note:**

> And then Robin moves to San Francisco and joins ACT UP and, eventually, gets super into Paula Cole. Sorry, I don't make the rules.
> 
>  **Loose translation for the scene in French:**  
>  "Hey, precious. How's it going?"  
> "It's going terrible, but I'm starving. Thanks."  
> "My pleasure. But... you really scared us. Can I help with whatever it is? The bad stuff?"  
> "No, it's carbonite stuff."  
> "Ah. Teenage Girl problems. I'll leave that to Mom. But you know you can tell us anything, right?"  
> [She could say: I'm a lesbian. I like girls.]  
> "I know."
> 
> [This may or may not be Will/Erica's precise D&D manual who's to say.](https://thetrove.is/Books/Dungeons%20%26%20Dragons/%20BX%20BECMI/1983%20BECMI/Set%201%20-%20Basic%20Rules%20Box%20Set.pdf)


End file.
